Hans shuddered with the cold. Though snow lay all around, covering castle, land and ice in the moat, the sky was, for the nonce, clear. Christmas carols—sung by a local group of schoolchildren for the benefit of the headquarters staff—carried far in the dense, icy air, ringing off castle stone and leafless tree.
Standing on an arched stone bridge over the moat, leaning on its stone wall guardrail, Hans stared into the sky at the twinkling stars. He willed his mind to blankness, seeking rest in temporary oblivion.
In this Hans was successful, so much so that he never noticed the tapping of boots on the stones of the bridge.
It was only when Mühlenkampf laid a hand on his shoulder and announced, "The next wave is here, Hansi," that Hans awoke from his reverie.
"So soon? I had hoped we would have more time. Maybe even get half equipped with the new-model Tigers. Get a few of them, at least."
"They only just finished putting the prototype through its tests, Hans. The only way we will ever see them is if we can hang on for at least a year."
Hans nodded then looked skyward. "Up to the navy for now, though," he said.
Already new stars began to appear and quickly die as the two fleets met in a dance of destruction.
The ship's commander, Kapitän Mölders, could not help but be amused at his ship's station. Being a part of Task Fleet 7.1 was unremarkable. But, along with another battle cruiser, the Almirante Guillermo Brown, and half a dozen of the ad hoc frigates converted out of Galactic courier vessels, being an escort for Supermonitor Moscow certainly was worth a minor chuckle. What would Lindemann or Lütjens have said? he wondered, thinking of those two brave and worthy German seamen who had gone down with the original Bismarck early in World War Two. Mölders would have chuckled too, except that he, Moscow, those half dozen frigates and two more task fleets were racing at breakneck pace into a death absolutely certain.
There was no chance of victory in any sense except that of taking a few with them. The Posleen wave, sixty-five globes, each composed of hundreds of smaller ships connected for interstellar travel, was simply too great, unimaginably great. And Earth's defending fleet was simply too small.
Victory, if it came, depended on the ground forces. Victory, for the fleet, would be giving those ground forces the greatest possible chance. Final victory was something not one man or woman aboard the ships had any hope of ever seeing. No more so did Mölders.
On Lütjens' view-screen Mölders saw a brilliant new sun appear for a long moment. A message from Moscow poured into his ear through an earpiece kept there. Mölders' eyes widened, then turned suddenly soft.
"Gentlemen," he announced in a breaking voice to the bridge crew, "that sun was the Japanese battle cruiser Genjiro Shirakami.38 It has rammed an enemy globe and detonated itself. Supermonitor Honshu believes that that globe was completely destroyed."
"So we only have another sixty-four or so to go, eh, sir?" whispered Mölder's exec.
Lightning flashed and new-born suns flared in space over head. Hans wondered idly at the details, but knew deep down that the details could not matter. He had seen the estimates; Mühlenkampf had shared them with his senior officers. The human fleet was doomed and was not going to do all that much good, either. Still anything was better than nothing and the blooming suns of destroyed ships, coupled with the silvery streaks of hypervelocity anti-ship missiles, made for quite a show.
But he had seen similar shows before, ones that had kept his attention even more raptly . . .
The attack seemed to come from nowhere and from everywhere. One moment found Hans fast asleep in his barracks. The next thunder-crashing moment found him leaping from his bunk, fully alert as only a very combat experienced veteran could come alert. He reached instinctively for the Schmeisser he had acquired on his own ticket as well as the combat harness that held an extra half dozen magazines for the submachine gun. Carrying both in his hands and shouting in his wretched Hebrew for the dozen men who shared the small hut with him to take their positions along the camp's perimeter, Hans stumbled to the shelter's door. Jacking the Schmeisser's bolt once, Hans left the hut with Sol's shouts ringing behind him, directing the others.
Outside was bedlam. Mortar rounds splashed down to briefly light the area with sudden lightning and lingering thunder. Tracers arced through the camp, seemingly from all around. Though this was the first attack it was not the first time Hans had cursed the sloppiness of the amateur, ad hoc, wretchedly trained Israeli army. No wonder the Arabs had gotten through somewhere along the none-too-distant front and come here for easy pickings.
Fierce cries of "Allahu akbar" resounded from a shallow streambed to the north as the volume of fire began to pick up from that direction Not quite sure why, Hans began moving in that direction. Half dressed, more importantly perhaps half undressed, shrieking women began to streak by in their flight. He called out repeatedly, "Anna? Anna?"
One Israeli girl shouted to him, "Anna stayed behind to fight and cover us!" Hans moved out, alone, into the night.
He found her spitting and cursing defiance at the three Arabs who had her pinned and spread-eagled for a fourth crouching between her legs, tugging at whatever covered the lower half of her body. His experienced finger caressed the trigger four times, then a fifth to make sure of one still-twitching, towel-headed form.
Hans reached down and grabbed the girl's shirt. As he did so he noticed that she was trouserless and that her rifle, bolt jammed open, was empty. Standing erect again, Hans began to half trot backwards, dragging the girl and firing backwards to discourage pursuit.
Mortar fire was still falling, making life on the surface unsafe for man or girl. Coming to a narrow slit trench, Hans jumped in and dragged Anna down with him, pushing her gently to the trench's dusty floor.
"You'll be safe here, Anna. I won't let anything happen to you."
It was only then that she began to cry, small half-stifled whimpers at first, growing with time to great wracking sobs. Hans tried his poor best to comfort her with little soft pats while keeping a watch topside for approaching dangers. The raid seemed to be ending, the Arab's fire slacking off. The camp was better lit now, what with half a dozen buildings burning brightly. Perhaps that was what had driven the Arabs off. Natural raiders and almost hopeless as soldiers, they would rarely press an attack without every conceivable advantage.
In time, under Hans' gentle care, Anna's sobs subsided. "They were going to rape me," she announced, needlessly. "You should not have risked yourself. It would not have killed me."
Hans shrugged. "Perhaps it would not have, girl. They very well might have though, their fun once done."
Anna echoed Hans' shrug. With an unaccountable angry tone she said, "I have a name, you know? Anyway, little matter if they had."
"Don't say that!" he shouted with unusual ferocity, then, more gently, almost a whisper, "I know you have a name, Anna."
"Why?" she asked. "You've never shown you care. Not until tonight anyway."
"I care, Anna. I always have."
"You never showed," she accused.
"I couldn't."
"Why not? Because I was a camp whore? Because I have a tattoo?"
Hans felt a wave of sickness wash over him. "I knew about the tattoo. I never knew about the . . . other."
"I was though, for years. For the guards at Ravensbrück."
Hans remembered some disgusted words from another SS man during a very brief sojourn at Birkenau. His sense of sickness grew greater still, great enough to show.
Misinterpreting, Anna turned her face away to hide forming tears. "It was not by my choice, never by my choice. But I understand why you won't want anything to do with me . . ."
"Stop that," Hans commanded. "It isn't your tattoo and it isn't a past you had no choice in. It's . . . that I have a tattoo as well."
"No, you don't," Anna insisted. "I've seen your arm."
"Mine," Hans sighed wearily, "isn't on my arm."
"But . . ." Anna covered her mouth under eyes gone wide with too much understanding. She turned and fled the trench and went alone into the fire-flickered night.
There were no more "tracers" in space, no new suns that burst brilliantly before fading into nothingness. The battle there was over and Hans had no doubt who had won—more importantly, lost—it. Earth's skies, once briefly recovered, were once again in the possession of the invader.
Mühlenkampf cleared his throat. "They will be on us tomorrow, gentlemen, if not sooner. Best return to your units now."
Silently, sullenly, perhaps a bit fearfully the men began to separate and depart, each to his division, brigade or regiment.
The shining behemoth positively gleamed with menace. Where Anna and her sisters dazzled, the new model stunned. From the tip of her railgun to the back of her turret, from the top of that narrow, sharklike turret to the treads resting on the concrete floor, from the twin mounds housing close-in defense weapons on her front glacis to the slanted rear, Tiger III, Ausführung B was a dream come true.
"She'll be a nightmare to the enemy," observed Mueller, for once satisfied with the armament.
Indowy Rinteel, at loose ends since the Darhel Tir's withdrawal, had joined the team to help with the railgun. He had no human-recognized degree in engineering, but many Indowy, and he was one, had an almost genetic ability to tinker. Rinteel agreed entirely about the "nightmare" part.
Prael snorted through his beard with disgust. "She might well be. But she is only one nightmare where we needed a veritable plague of them, dammit. It has been the old story. Too little, too late."
"We pushed for too much," conceded Mueller. "We should have used the railguns we salvaged to upgrade the existing Tigers."
"Maybe yes, maybe no," countered Nielsen. "They will still do good service supplementing the Planetary Defense Batteries."
"This one could do as well," observed Breitenbach.
"No," corrected Henschel, "for we do not even have a crew for her."
"Be a shame to just let her be captured or destroyed to prevent capture," said Schlüssel. "And it is not entirely true that we do not have a crew. We, ourselves, know her as well as any crew could, and if we alone are not enough to man the secondary weapons . . . well . . . she is much more capable, her AI is much more capable, than the A model's."
"You are suggesting we steal her?" asked Prael.
Mueller smiled. "Not 'steal,' Karl. Just take her out for some combat testing is all. And I used to be a very good driver."
Tonight's fireworks put those of the previous evening into the shade. Between roughly ten thousand individual Posleen ships, the globes having broken up, and the fires of several hundred Planetary Defense Batteries and Earth-bound railguns the skies were one continuous stream of pyrotechnic entertainment.
What was it Admiral Nelson said? wondered Hans. Ah, I remember: "A ship's a fool to fight a fort." He was right, of course, a ship is. But get enough ships and it becomes only a matter of time, not of foolishness.
There was no practical shielding, no defense, for ship or shore battery. The defenders had only the triple advantages of being able to choose when to unmask, to reveal their position by opening fire; that the Posleen had no cover whatsoever; and that, as a practical matter, they tended to handle their ships somewhat badly. They were, after all, a fairly stupid race. Still, these paltry favors were more than matched by Posleen numbers.
Hans considered some folksy wisdom on the subject: "Quantity has a quality all its own," and Stalin's famous jibe, "Quantity becomes quality at some point in time."
The Communist bastard was right about that one, too, thought Hans, remembering distantly, the sight of burning individual Panthers and Tigers, a collection of half a dozen or more Soviet machines dead before them, while endless columns of Russian T-34s passed the burning German machines by.
A—relatively—nearby Planetary Defense Battery opened up with a furious fusillade of kinetic energy shots, the bolts leaving eye-burning trails of straight silver lightning in the sky. Overhead, a half dozen or more new stars blazed briefly. Then the combined might of hundreds of Posleen ships poured down onto the PDB, blasting it to ruin, raising a mushroom cloud, and even shaking Hans as he stood in his hatch atop Anna's turret.
We are hurting them, maybe even hurting them badly. But it won't be enough.
As if in confirmation, a veritable torrent of Posleen fire poured through down from the heavens to fall somewhere far to the west.
That would be for the benefit of the French, I think.
Not for the first time, Major General Henri Merle cursed his government's pigheaded refusal to cooperate with anyone. On the remote television screen that adorned one wall of his command post he saw a nightmare he had somehow hoped he would never see again, a sea of reptilian centaurs chewing through wire, mines, and machine gun and artillery fire to get at the defenders. The actinic glare of the Posleen railguns crossed over and through the red tracers of France's last defenders.
The command post shook slightly with the steady vibrations of the fort's three automatic cannon firing from their retractable turrets. On the screen the fire of the short-range guns, short ranged because the turrets were too small to permit much recoil, drew lines of mushrooming black clouds through the enemy host, leaving thousands of destroyed Posleen bodies in their wake. Each gun was capable of sending forth several dozen one-hundred-thirty-five-millimeter shells per minute by virtue of their unique chain-driven feeding system. All of that was done automatically except for feeding of the shells into the conveyor system that hoisted them aloft. That job was done by dozens of sweating, straining men in ammunition chambers far below.
We built this thing to deter the Germans from attacking straight into our industrial heartland, mused Merle, with a grin. We succeeded too. They obliged us by going through Belgium instead. Then we kept the forts up in pretty pristine condition for twenty years in case the Russians decided to get jolly. Maybe it really did help deter them too, never know. Now finally we are using them, after a frantic race to restore them, to hang on to this last corner of la belle patrie.
"And they're working," he said aloud. "Killing the alien bastards in droves. And the damned government just had to throw that away by refusing to cooperate with the Germans."
"Sir?" queried Merle's aide.
"We could have had a couple of Boche armored corps here with us," answered Merle. "We could have had a few score infantry divisions too, to help us hold this line. But, no. Impossible. We would only let them help us if they were willing to let us dictate policy. Tell me, Francois, if you were the Germans, if you were anyone, would you let the government of France, any government of France, dictate policy to you?"
"Certainement pas,"39 answered the captain, with a wry—and very cynically and typically French—grin. "Who could be so foolish?"
"No one, and so no more would I. And so, though we are murdering those alien assholes by the bushel, they are still going to get through. They are going to take these forts, peel us like hard-boiled eggs, and then feast on the contents. And then they're going to go past us . . ."
The command post suddenly shook more violently than the automatic cannons alone could account for. Merle was tossed from his seat by the shock.
"Merde, what was that?" he asked, rising to his feet.
"I don't know, mon colonel."
The phone rang. After all these decades the telephone system still worked. The aide, Francois, answered. Merle saw his face turn white.
As Francois replaced the ancient telephone on its hook he said, "Battery B. It's . . . gone. The aliens somehow penetrated all the way down to the ammunition storage area. Hardly anyone escaped. The area's been sealed off to prevent fire from spreading."
Now Merle's face paled. "My God, there are twenty thousand civilians down there below the ammunition for that battery."
"Lost, sir."
"Do we still have communication with the Germans behind us?" Merle asked.
"I believe so, sir. Why?"
"Get me Generalleutnant Von der Heydte on the line. I am going to place this fortress under his command and ask him for any aid he can spare to save our people. While I am doing that I want you to begin calling the other sector commanders and giving them my suggestion they do the same. Fuck the government. We haven't had a decent one since Napoleon the First, anyway."
Von der Heydte was stunned. "The bloody frogs are asking us to do what?"
"They want us to take over, sir. At least General Merle does, and some others. I understand we are getting calls all along the front. They can't hold. Their army, at least, knows it. And they have decided to ignore their government."
"Okay . . . I can buy that. And they would be a useful addition to our effort if they will just cooperate."
"General Merle sounded eager to cooperate, sir. His exact words were, 'Tell General Von der Heydte I am submitting myself and my entire command to his authority.' But there's a catch."
"Aha! I knew it. What catch?"
"Sir, they want us to open up our lines to permit the evacuation of several million civilians. Several hundred thousand in General Merle's sector alone."
"Can we?"
"Risky, sir. We could conceivably open a lane or perhaps two. I don't think we have the engineer assets to re-close more than two, anyway. But even they will be narrow passages. I doubt we can get everyone through. And, sir?"
"Yes?"
"Sir, they're a very proud people. You know Merle and the other frogs wouldn't be asking if they thought they had a prayer of holding on their own."
"I see," and Von der Heydte did see. "We're going to have to put some of our own people out there and at risk to cover the evacuation."
Von der Heydte thought some more, then walked over to observe his situation map. Noting the location of one division in particular, he dredged through his memory for an answer. Finding that answer he ordered, "Call Mühlenkampf. Yes, 'SS' Mühlenkampf. Ask if I can borrow his Charlemagne Division. Tell him he'll likely have a mutiny if he doesn't give them to me, because I am not above asking them to come directly. And tell him he is unlikely to get many of them back."
The men in the dank and malodorous depths of the fortress still noticed her, even under the pale, flickering light. Though well past the bloom of youth, and despite the deprivations and terrors of the last nine months, Isabelle De Gaullejac was still quite a fine-looking woman beneath her grimy, unwashed face. Cleaned up, and when she could clean herself Isabelle was fastidious, those men would have called her "pretty"—if not beautiful.
Still, there was beauty and then there was beauty. Standing, Isabelle had a bearing and obvious dignity that was proud, even almost regal. Whatever she lacked in classic line of features her girlish shape and posture up made for, and more.
The pride was personal. The regality was perhaps the result of genetics, for she came from a family ennobled for over five hundred years.
She had grown up in a real castle, not one of those palaces that went by the name. Her girlhood home had been a hunting castle used by King Henry, Henry the Fowler, in the Middle Ages. Thus, the cold, damp, dirty and detestably uncomfortable hell that was the bowels of Fort Hackenberg was no great shock to her. She had hated King Henry's castle as a girl. She hated Hackenberg now. But she could deal with the one as she had dealt with the other, through sheer will to endure.
But it was with relief that she greeted the news the fort was to be evacuated. Gathering up her two sons, one teenaged and the other a mere stripling, she dressed them as warmly as the meager stocks of clothing they had been able to carry permitted. Expecting a long march to safety, she packed a bag of necessities. These included food, some medicine for the younger boy, who had picked up a cough in the fort, a change of clothing each, and a bottle of first rate Armagnac. Two of the wretched army blankets the family had been issued were also stuffed into the bag. She was not a small or weak woman and so, while the pack was heavy, she thought she could bear it, if her teenager, Thomas, could help a bit.
One particle among a smelly sea of humanity, she stood at a rear entrance—when Germany had been the threat it had served as a sally port to the front—and held her boys under close rein while awaiting the word to move.
Others gathered to her, many others. That air of royalty, of command, which she radiated drew the confused, the lost, the helpless and hopeless to her as if she were a magnet. She took it, as she took nearly everything, with calm.
She was not calm inside, however. She had long since lost touch with her husband. Isabelle feared the worst.
There was a murmur of sound from behind her. Isabelle turned to see a tall man, tall especially by French standards, easing his way through the crowded corridor. When he passed close by, she saw even in the dim light, that his uniform was midnight black. On his collar she saw insignia that made her want to spit at the soldier.
He reached the thick steel doors at the end of the corridor and stood on something, a concrete block Isabelle assumed it was, perhaps one that held up one of the great steel doors. In clear French the man announced, "I am Captain Jean Hennessey of the 37th SS Panzer Grenadier Division, Charlemagne, and I am here to lead you to safety.
"This fortress is going to fall very soon. Even now the rest of my battalion is taking up position to hold the crest and the interior of the fort as long as possible to allow all of you—as many of you as possible—the chance to escape. We are going to have about a twelve-mile walk from here to a place where we can cross German lines. You represent food to the aliens, so they will try to cut down any they can to feed themselves once we are gone from the cover of this fortress. My battalion will do all it can to prevent that. Once we are out of enemy range, the battalion will execute a fighting withdrawal to cover your escape."
Though a scion of royalty, Isabelle's politics had always been far to the left of center. She wanted desperately to shout Hennessey down, to curse him and the hated and hateful insignia he wore. But then the tug of one of her boys on her arm made her reconsider. She could not risk angering one who might be their salvation.