Afraid even to whisper it, Mühlenkampf could not help but think, We're doomed.
In the end, though they had hurt the Posleen fleet badly, the Planetary Defense Batteries, even supplemented by salvaged railguns, had failed. Mühlenkampf had known they would. Their presumptive failure had be the major reason behind the creation of Army Group Reserve in the first place.
The landings had begun. Reports came of at least fifteen apparently major landings across Germany and Poland, along with hundreds of minor ones. The total numbers of enemy on the ground was staggering. Mühlenkampf's intelligence officer estimated that the total numbers were in the scores of millions.
Germany and what remained of Poland were in danger of being literally inundated under an alien flood.
In some places that flood was being controlled. Newly developed weapons had their influence, chief among them the neutron bombs that the extreme left would never have permitted had they been allowed continued influence. And, though there were never enough of them—there had not been time to build enough of them—and though they were not always in the right place to be used, even so, the enhanced radiation weapons left whole swathes of the enemy puking and dying at many of the landing sites.
The enhanced radiation weapons, "neutron bombs" they were often called, were actually a regressive technological step in weapons development. They differed from more usual nuclear weapons only in not having the heavy uranium shell fitted around the central fissile core that made the nukes so much more powerful, blast-wise, than their predecessors. The uranium shell enhanced this blast by containing and harnessing the neutron emissions of that core.
But the neutrons, unharnessed, were deadly enough in their own right. Emerging from the relatively small blast they acted like tiny bits of shrapnel, passing through bodies and killing the cells they passed through. Enough of them passing through a healthy human would kill within minutes. Moreover the death was miserably demoralizing to any who saw it and lived. Even at a considerable distance they would kill in anything from hours to days. Those deaths were more wretched still.
Best of all, the smaller blast did less physical damage and left comparatively little residual radiation. Indeed, only where it struck steel or a steel alloy did the neutrons create a long-term radiation hazard, by making the metal itself give off gamma radiation.
One bomb—a single one-hundred-fifty-five-millimeter shell—used timely, was said to have killed as many as one hundred thousand Posleen within twenty minutes of its detonation. Scores of ships had been captured intact, though highly radioactive, at that one site. Moreover, casualties in the nearby civilian towns had been negligible, as had environmental damage.
Some Posleen the neutron bombs were not needed to destroy. One of the Posleen landings, for example, had had the misfortune of coming down between Erfurt and Weimar; smack in the middle of Army Group Reserve. The aliens' resistance there had been both brief and futile.
Despite these little successes, Mühlenkampf still thought, we're doomed.
"Well, first things first," he announced to his staff. "And the first thing is to smash through to Berlin to relieve both its defenders and its people. On the way I want to eliminate the alien infestation between Magdeberg, Dessau and Halle. Then we'll spread out to clear up the area behind the Vistula line. There's not much between Berlin and Schleswig-Holstein, so the Berliners should be able to make out on their own if they have to withdraw later."
It had been a nightmare for Isabelle, her two sons, and the thousands of other refugees fleeing the Posleen onslaught with them. Emerging for the first time in weeks from embattled and falling Fort Hackenberg, she had been immediately plunged into a very close simulacrum of hell. All around, seemingly at random, fell horrid, frightening bolts from the sky. To their din was added the freight train rattle of German and French artillery passing overhead. Behind her, muffled by the high ground, the torrent of human artillery lashing out from the fortress and other places to rip at the enemy was like a distant but ferocious thunderstorm. Ahead of her, the ground had been plowed and beaten into a moonscape. Also from behind came the occasional flash of a Posleen railgun round striking down at the refugees.
Any refugee that was hit was left for dead; the enemy's railguns destroyed mere flesh beyond hope of recovery. An occasional pistol shot sounding from the rear announced those few occasions when a straggler, or a wounded refugee, was given a final mercy.
Captain Hennessey led the way, one of his sergeants bringing up the rear of the column. Isabelle's long, child-dragging strides would have placed her beside him if she had permitted it. Even the desire to get herself and her boys safely away from even random enemy fire was not great enough to make her willing to foul herself by proximity to the French SS man, however. She did find she was close enough to hear him speak into the radio from time to time, and even to hear what was said to him.
The news from that radio was frightening: reports of death, destruction and defeat as the covering battalion from Division Charlemagne was decimated and driven back, again and again, by the massive alien assault. Some of the news made Hennessey stiffen with pain, she could see. Some made his chest swell with pride and his bearing assume a regal posture to match her own.
Once, perhaps, she saw him reach up to wipe something from the general vicinity of his eyes.
The sounds of fighting, distant but growing closer, put speed to the refugees' feet. The overflight of artillery grew, if anything, more intense as Charlemagne's soldiers, much reduced in numbers, were forced to call for and depend on it more with each lost man and combat vehicle.
At length, Isabelle saw Hennessey relax. The German border was in sight.
He was met by another soldier in the field gray of the more traditional German regular army, the Bundeswehr. Briefly, she wondered if there would be some scene of hostility between the two, coming from different services and even different nations. But, no, the two met as if long-lost brothers, placing hands on shoulders and shaking hands briskly, illuminating the scene with gleaming smiles.
An old woman with a timid smile came up to Isabelle, drawn apparently by the younger woman's shining inner strength. "Madame?" the older one asked, "what is going to be done with us? Where shall we go, what shall we do?"
"That is a very good question, madame," Isabelle answered. "Let me go and find out."
With that, Isabelle forced down her disgust. In truth, that was somehow easier now than she would have expected. Dragging her two children behind her, she walked directly up to Hennessey and the German. Then she stopped and asked the men the same questions.
The German answered, in rather cultured French, actually, "From here, you will be billeted temporarily in some of the public buildings in Saarlouis. We are arranging food and bedding, medical care too, but it will take a little time and you may spend the night hungry and cold. We did not expect this, you see."
"I see," she said, quietly then paused to think. Behind her the long snaking column of refugees advanced miserably through a fairly narrow marked lane. A loudspeaker announced, in appallingly bad French she thought, that the refugees must stay within the markings as the land to either side was heavily mined. He also began to announce the same message the German had given to Isabelle, so she thought no more about the old woman.
For reasons she could not articulate, she resisted joining the stream and stayed there by the side of the French and German officers, watching that human flood pass by.
Eventually Hennessey said, "You really should go on, madame. Please, do. Take your children to safety." To the German he said, "And Karl, you have everything well in hand here. I have things to do."
She nodded once, briskly, then turned and with the boys began the fearful trudge through that narrow lane in the broad belt of death. She never saw the look of farewell the German gave to the Frenchman. She might not have understood it if she had.
Isabelle was worried at first if the Germans had really gotten all of the mines out of the way. The thought of stepping on one, worse, of one of her babies stepping on one, sent a tremor through her. Then, she consoled herself with the knowledge that the Germans, give the Boche their due, were a very thorough people; that, and that failure to make the trip would see her and her babies eaten.
She enjoyed French cuisine of course; she had no desire to become it.
Past the fields of mines, Isabelle glanced to left and right. Her eyes began to pick out details, a solid-looking slab of concrete here, a vicious-looking barbed wire obstacle there. Three times she passed artillery batteries firing furiously. She had never in her life imagined such a painful torrent of sheer sound.
"God, isn't she the sweetest sounding thing you've ever heard," whispered Mueller, though the intercom from his drive station.
"What do you mean?" asked Schlüssel. "This lovely bitch makes no sound at all except for the tracks."
Mueller laughed. "I know, my friend. And had you spent any time in panzers you would know how sweet a sound silence can be."
The positions they had chosen for themselves were somewhat contralogical. At least they were not the obvious ones. Though Mueller and Schlüssel had worked in the design team, respectively, on gun and drive train, Mueller's army experience as a driver and Schlüssel's Navy experience as a gunnery officer had put them back in those positions. Breitenbach had no military experience whatsoever but had worked on both armor and close-in defense weapons in the design team. Thus he took command of those and of the half dozen factory workers who had volunteered to run them. Henschel was old, and though one could never have imagined him as loader on a conventional tank he was more than capable of running the automated feed system of any Tiger. A nuclear specialist, Seidl, one of those who had installed the Tiger's pebble-bed reactors, was in charge of power. One of the factory concession cafeteria workers volunteered to run the small kitchen and double as a secondary gunner. Lastly, Prael, because he knew the AI package to perfection, and because Tiger IIIB relied heavily on its AI, was selected by acclaim to command the tank.
Indowy Rinteel, who was not a member of the crew, felt a strange sadness, and—more than a sense of loss—a sense of something missing from his own makeup. These humans were so strange. They had treated him very kindly from the beginning. No, "kind" was not all. They had been tactful, enough so that he was sometimes almost comfortable among them, despite their size and flashing canines.
Kind and tactful, both, they had been; gentle almost as the Indowy themselves were gentle. Yet, apparently gleefully, they were preparing to go forth to kill and, likely, to die. Rinteel could understand the willingness to die for one's people. He had come to Earth knowing that, in attempting to sabotage Darhel plans he might well be caught and killed.
What he didn't understand was this ability to kill. Alone among the known denizens of the galaxy only the humans and the Posleen shared this unfortunate ability. Didn't they see how it imperiled their souls as individuals?
Or, perhaps, did the humans see? Did they see and decide that, some things were not only worth dying for, they were worth damnation for? It had to be thought on.
The ammunition hoppers were full. Where Tigers like Anna and her sisters carried a mere fifty rounds, the comparatively infinitesimal bulk of this tank's magnetically propelled projectiles allowed the portage of no less than 442 mixed rounds. The range on its gun would allow taking out Posleen ships even in fairly high orbit.
Fuel was obviously not going to be a problem.
"You know, gentlemen," observed Prael, "this tank needs a name."
"Pamela?" queried Mueller, thinking of his wife.
"Deutschland?" offered Schlüssel, thinking of the ship.
"Bayern," asked Breitenbach, "for where she was built?"
Prael laughed. "You louts have no culture. Have you never attended the opera? Bah! 'Louts,' I say! Think, men. What is she but a Valkyrie, a chooser of the slain? What are those Mauserwerke bulbs on front but a Valkyrie's tits? And what are we but men on a death ride? No, no. This tank must be 'Brünnhilde'!"
Rinteel did not get the joke. He rarely understood human humor, and what it was about the two weapons mounts on front that raised such a terrifying show of teeth from the humans was completely beyond him.
But that it was humor, he recognized easily. Indowy ideas of "funny" were different from those of humans but that they had a sense of humor was beyond dispute.
They are about to die and they laugh. They are about to kill and they laugh. Truly they are a subject worthy of study.
Rinteel reached a sudden decision. Walking up to Prael in the head downturned, insecurely shuffling, Indowy way, he asked, "Friend-human Karl?"
"Yes, Friend-Rinteel?"
"I was wondering . . . do you think you might have room for one more?"
Prael seemed to think for a bit. Then he answered, eyes twinkling, "We're riding a Valkyrie to Valhalla. Why . . . Rinteel . . . it would be just plain wrong not to take along a Nibelung."
Rinteel did not at all understand the fresh gales of laughter, though he understood that he was welcome to come.
What the Posleen thought about the megadecibel playing of "Ride of the Valkyries" as the 47th Panzer Korps smashed into them, Hans had no idea. But he figured it couldn't hurt anything.
The Korps advanced with, as usual, Panzeraufklärungsbrigade (Armored Reconnaissance Brigade) Florian Geyer in the lead. At a high price in blood and steel, this group had mapped out the enemy's posture, running rings around them and determining that this was by no means a single landing, but gave every indication that it was composed of no less than three different, apparently noncooperating, groups. In any case, the daring men of Florian Geyer got away with things during their reconnaissance that they never should have had the Posleen worked together.
Hans was quite certain that Army Group Reserve could simply roll over the enemy. But he saw Mühlenkampf's cleverness. If they were noncooperating, as the Posleen often—usually—were, then they might well be reduced one at a time rather than all at once. It would cost a little more time but was very likely to save precious blood and steel. Hans wholly approved of saving both, where possible.
Not that he thought it would make a rat's ass of difference to the ultimate outcome of the war.
With his panzers spread out over thirty kilometers, behind and covering Divisions Hohenstauffen and Frundsberg, Hans awaiting the rising of the Posleen ships to meet the armored spear even now plunging through their collective skin in search of the vitals.
But not one Posleen ship arose from this group to contest with the humans. So fast was the thrust, so apparently unexpected, that the enemy were simply crushed asunder with frightful haste. Having a little time for himself, Hans stroked his left breast pocket.
Hans was somewhat surprised at Sol's vehemence towards the men who shared the hut. Certainly the chewing out he was giving them bore some relation to their clumsiness and torpor when the camp had been struck a few nights before. But it seemed to Hans extreme. Nonetheless, he could not fault Sol for insisting that the crew spend an entire night in punishment drills for their laxity. Perhaps it would help next time.
He did wonder why Sol had waited so long, however.
He had been trying very hard to get Anna, and that look of horror on her face, out of his mind ever since. His effort was without success so far. He had wondered too if she would spread the word of his origins. It would make life impossible here, he knew. Perhaps that would be for the best though. He'd have to be moved if his past became widely known. At some other camp—the Israelis ran a few others like this one—perhaps he would have a chance to continue his work of making what poor amends he could, without being in agony over the daily presence of a woman he adored but could never have.
He had been trying to forget Anna, and the sins inflicted on her, but without success. She filled his mind and his heart, yes and also his desires, more profoundly than any woman he had ever even imagined. Walking from the training field to the little hut, he was awash in emotions he had never really believed existed before.
In this state of distracted misery, he entered the darkened hut to hear, "There is something I must know."
"What?" he asked of the shadows. "What did you say? Anna?"
"Did you work the camps? I must know."
He realized from the voice that it was her. "Not the way you mean it," he answered.
"It is a simple question," Anna insisted. "You were either there or you were not."
"I was there once, at Birkenau, for about three days. But I didn't, couldn't, stay."
"Why?" she demanded.
"Because it sickened me." And Hans told her of his very brief sojourn into efficient and organized murder of the helpless.
"Did you kill Jews?" she asked, expanding her interrogation.
"If so, and it is very likely," he admitted, "not because they were Jews, but because they were armed partisans trying to kill me. That, or Soviet soldiers."
There was a long silence as the girl digested the information. Finally, she announced, simply, "Fair enough."
Again the hut was filled with emptiness for long moments. With eyes adjusting to the dim light, Hans saw Anna place a pistol on his makeshift nightstand.
Hans asked, "What was that for?"
"To kill you, if you had been one of them. And then to do the same to myself, for having to live in a world without you."
Hans began to approach her. "Anna, I . . ."
"Wait!" she ordered, holding an open palm towards him. "Before you come closer there are things you must know. Ugly things. Please, sit."
Hans did so, taking Sol's rickety chair from next to his bunk and placing himself on it, facing the girl.
"I am from Berlin, a Berliner Jewess," she began. "My father was a professor, my mother a housewife. My father had once been a promising violinist, but he was also a reserve lieutenant and when the Great War began he joined his regiment and went off to serve. He fought for almost four years, before losing an arm and winning a second Iron Cross, an Iron Cross First Class, for bravery. Of course, he could not play violin anymore but the talent was still there. He could teach and he did. And I remember he was very proud of those medals."
Anna's voice was surreally calm. "To look at me is to see a version of him. He looked about as Jewish as I, which is to say not very. Even when the Nazis came to power, he and we suffered less harassment than most Jews did. And he was protected by that Iron Cross, for Hitler himself had decreed that the laws against the Jews were not to apply to decorated veterans.
"My mother and I had no such protection. Or if we did, the lesser Nazis chose to ignore it. We were picked up, and he, a man who had shed his blood, had himself been maimed and lost his life's dream for Germany, followed us voluntarily to the camp, the one at Ravensbrück. Though this was normally a woman's camp a special exception was made for my father, for some reason.
"I was thirteen years old."
Anna shuddered then, apparently at the memory of what she was about to say.
"Under the overcrowding, the lack of food and medicine, and the cold, my mother soon sickened and died. With the loss of her, my father lost his will to live as well. He followed her into the grave within two months."
"I was alone in the world; all alone, Hans. Can you imagine? I suppose I would have died too, without an adult to protect and maybe steal a little food for me. But then, as happens, I changed, began changing anyway, from a girl to a woman. And the guards began to notice."
Now it was Hans' turn to shudder; he knew what was coming next. "Anna you don't have to—"
"Yes I do!" she screamed, eyes wild in her face. Then, after some internal struggle, she said, a little more calmly, "I do. You have to know; you have a right to know.
"The first one was not the worst. He beat me, of course, never even tried to simply tell me what to do. He beat me then tore my clothes off and bent me over one of the hard wooden beds we had."
Hans could not remember ever hearing a voice more hate-filled. "Oh, how I screamed and cried and begged and pleaded. That only made him hit me more. The beating lasted a lot longer than the fucking did, too. Maybe that was why he did it, because the filthy swine couldn't last more than thirty seconds.
"When he was finished he turned me around and slapped my face three or four more times. As he turned to leave he tossed half a moldy sausage onto the floor. He said, 'Eat that, Jew bitch. When I come back I'll have a different kind of sausage for you to eat.'"
"And I suppose he did, too," Hans said, bitterly.
Anna began to rock, gently, back and forth. "Oh, yes," she answered, distantly, as if from a far away place. "He, and the other guards. Sometimes ten or twelve of them a night. Sometimes all at once. Sometimes they would make a 'party' of me." The rocking grew more intense.
With a voice struggling not to break, she continued, "Hans, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that you can imagine that they did not make me do. They would even take me out of the camp sometimes and sell me to passing soldiers. For my troubles, they would feed me a bit, maybe give me a toothbrush and some tooth powder, used clothing once in a while, even some cheap makeup for 'special' occasions." She shuddered yet again. "That's why I so despise makeup, you know? They would make me put it on like a Reeperbahn40 prostitute and then taunt me that I was just another Jewish whore.
"The worst part though was that not one of them, even once, not in all those years, ever called me by my name. You remember I got angry with you when you called me 'girl'? The kinder ones would sometimes say, 'Bend over, girl,' or 'Get on your knees, girl.' But usually it was 'Jew-bitch, Jew-whore, Jew-slut.' That sort of thing. I wasn't even a human being, just a fuck and suck machine."
At the memory of that last, that ultimate humiliation of being stripped of even a semblance of humanity, Anna lost control completely, breaking down into great, wracking sobs and a flood of long-suppressed tears. Hans, teary-eyed himself, was out of his chair in an instant, holding her, cradling her, stroking her hair and whispering how sorry he was, how much he loved her.
Finally, regaining a measure of control, she wrapped her arms around Hans, squeezed tight, and whispered, "Don't be sorry. It is over. And you didn't do any of it. But can you care for me now, now that you know?"
His own nose running slightly, Hans muffled back, "Now that I know what? That you were raped? That you survived? Thank God you survived, my love. You did nothing wrong and I could not love you more if you were as much a physical virgin as I hold you to be a spiritual one."
Relieved beyond measure, Anna melted into him then. But almost immediately stiffened again. "There is another thing. Something else you must know. I got pregnant, more than once. The first time I was not quite fifteen. The last time I was a bit over seventeen. It was an inconvenience to them, having to take me to the doctor and bribe him to abort me and keep quiet about it. So they bribed the doctor to . . . 'fix' . . . me. I say 'fix.' They said, 'spay.' Hans, I can never have children."
Beyond guilt and even beyond pity, Hans felt an indescribable sense of personal desolation. Nonetheless, he answered, "No matter, Anna. Please . . . believe, that doesn't matter to me."
With a last sniffle and a long, quiet pause, Anna came to a sudden, but long contemplated, decision. She stood up, drawing Hans upward with her. She forced a smile and looked deeply into his eyes and said, "I asked Sol to make sure we would not be disturbed; not for all night. I am twenty-three years old." She began to lead him to his bed, a smile appearing on her face for the first time that night. "That is too old to be any kind of a virgin, don't you think?"
Though the night sky was illuminated by the battle raging ahead, Hans Brasche ignored it, preferring instead to stroke the pocket containing all that was physical that remained of his love, and submerging in the memory of a first, blessed, night among thousands that were to follow.
The first of the three Posleen landing areas was cleansed before midday on the twenty-second. The second, having more warning, took longer. Not only did it take longer, but this time the Posleen did manage to loft a number of their ships. Hans' brigade went into action then, his forty Tigers ripping into the newly arrived Posleen. These died, but they died hard, taking seven of Hans' precious tanks to hell with them. Losses among the rest of the Korps were likewise not trivial.
The third landing south of Berlin was ready when the 47th Panzer Korps met them on Christmas Day.