Isabelle's head ached and her inner body rippled with the shock of masses of incoming alien kinetic energy weapons. Within and around the city and to the southwest, these landed, raising clouds of dirt and dust into the sullen sky. Artillery lent its own measure to the frightful din.
There were few streaks of silver lighting coming from the ground to answer the invader's fire, however. The news was clear that the enemy had hurt the Planetary Defense Batteries badly.
Somehow, she suspected that that artillery—and luck in avoiding the incoming KE weapons—might be all that stood between her boy, Thomas, and death.
She had seen her elder boy, once, briefly, since he had joined what she insisted on thinking of as "The Army." She could not even bring herself to say that he was a member of the Boche army. As to the branch? The insignia glittering on his collar had been almost impossible to ignore. She had put on the best face she could, even so.
Now, he was in danger. And she knew the boy was hardly trained for war. She could only hope for the best as she, her remaining boy, and millions of people, German and French both, prepared for the long trudge to safety, could it but be found, far to the north.
Reports from the front were uniformly bad. The Siegfried line was going to fall and soon. Only this knowledge gave serious impetus to those previously fleeing and about-to-become refugees' preparations for their flight.
Placing her pack upon her back, taking her remaining son by the hand, Isabelle took a glance backwards in the direction of where she presumed her Thomas was. Then, forcing herself to an unnatural strength, she joined the column of refugees heading to the north.
Of formal training there had been precious little. The week Thomas had spent in Charlemagne had proven just enough to teach him what little need be known to fire a military rifle from a concrete bunker, that, and to issue him a minimum of uniforms and equipment.
And minimum, when a young slender boy had to make a home in an icy concrete bunker, was little indeed. Thomas found himself shivering more or less constantly. Though some of this shivering was caused by reasons other than cold.
He had previously been spared personal sight of the enemy, except for what the television had shown of them. The reality was frightful beyond words; a mindless horde that charged forward heedless of loss so long as they might take one human down with them.
The boy's leader, Sergeant Gribeauval, seemed to have taken an interest in his survival. At least, the good sergeant spent a fair amount of time on his training, whenever the enemy didn't press the attack too closely. This absence of pressure was so rare, however, that the sergeant's help consisted mostly of little pointers and tips, and an occasional fatherly pat on the shoulder. Perhaps this was so because Thomas was the youngest member of the platoon by at least a year.
He had lost count of the number of attacks that Charlemagne had repelled so far. The pile of dead enemy to the front grew and grew. Even the wire was, by now, covered with their bodies.
This was, Thomas knew, a very bad sign, though behind the wire, between him and the aliens, a thin minefield gave some additional protection. He had helped reinforce the minefield, one day, with Sergeant Gribeauval and two others. The sergeant had often muttered about the scarcity of mines; that, and incomprehensible words about "silly royal English adulteresses."
There was a rustle of fallen leaves from behind the boy; booted feet entering the bunker.
"Young De Gaullejac?"
"Oui, mon sergeant," the boy answered. His breath formed a misty frost over the plastic rifle stock to which he kept his beardless cheek pressed.
"Pack your things, son, while keeping as good a watch to your front as you can. We have orders to pull back to the next position. Soon. It isn't as good as this one but the enemy hasn't penetrated it yet. The artillery is going to plaster the hell out of this place to cover our retreat."
Retreat was the only option Mühlenkampf could see. The Siegfried line and the Rheinland were lost, that much was clear. The enemy had finally gotten their act together and found the answer to the previously formidable defenses. It seemed the Germans had managed to do what they had done before, even with the Russians: teach an enemy to fight as a combined arms team.
"Scheisse," he cursed, without enthusiasm. "Scheisse to have to go through this a third time in one lifetime."
The rear area was a scene of terror and misery. Masses of people were evacuating to the north and west. Some of these, it was hoped, would make it to the underground cities constructed in Scandinavia. Others could seek shelter in the Alps; the Swiss had made that clear enough.
But they had to retreat, now, to shelter behind the Rhein. Even with the threatening breach presented by the enemy presence on their captured bridge, it was the last defensible obstacle the Fatherland owned, excepting only the easily turned Elbe.
Mühlenkampf knew that the Elbe was a place for enemy armies to meet, not for friendly ones to defend from.
If only he had a prayer of retaking the bridgehead. But without the 47th Korps, and Brasche's 501st Brigade, he knew he hadn't any chance of doing so any more. He had tried.
It wasn't that the Bundeswehr were bad troops, anymore. The last two campaigns for the defense of Germany had seen them make vast strides. The real swine in the army, officer or enlisted, were in penal battalions. Executing or, minimally, defanging those civilians who had interfered with the army's training and morale had also helped. But the 47th Korps had started with a bigger cadre, of generally rougher, tougher, more combat-experienced men. And that made all the difference.
He thought he had a prayer of containing the bridgehead, if only the armies in the Rheinland could be withdrawn to the safety of the Rhine's eastern bank. Reluctantly, fearfully, by no means certain he was right, Mühlenkampf ordered his operations officer, "Call off the attack to the bridge. Leave the infantry and penal korps behind to contain the enemy, along with one panzer and one panzer grenadier division detached from the army heavy Korps. Take the rest of the Army Group—Bah! Army Group? We have about a single army left under our control—north to the other bridges. Cross them over and have them help the troops in the Rheinland to disengage and withdraw.
"And get me the Kanzler. I need to ask for permission to use a few of the neutron weapons."
The crew of the tank, not least Prael, were sweating profusely, though the carefully controlled internal climate was not the cause of the sweat. Instead, it was the repeated near misses from Posleen space-borne weapons that had the crew in sweat-soaked clothing.
Brünnhilde had more elevation than the earlier model Tigers. These latter were used in mass, and so could generally count on the dead space above the turret being covered by another tank, standing off at a distance. Brünnhilde, however, fought alone and so had to be able to cover more of her own dead space. Moreover, while Anna's more or less conventional, albeit highly souped up, twelve-inch gun had a mighty recoil, and could not be elevated too much without having made the model too high for more usual engagements, Brunhilde's railgun had comparatively little recoil. Thus, she could elevate to eighty degrees above the horizontal.
She needed every bit of that . . . and more.
"Johann, halt, facing left," ordered Prael. Mueller quickly slewed the tank to a full stop while twisting her ninety degrees to the left.
Even while Mueller was slowing, then stopping the tank, Prael was setting his own aiming instrument on a Posleen ship, thirty miles away. When he had found the target on the commander's sight on he ordered the tank to lock on. Brunhilde's AI dutifully did so, then reported the fact.
Nervously, Prael waited while the railgun gave off three distinct thrums, each about twelve seconds apart. Finally, Schlüssel announced, "Hit."
Prael immediately commanded, "Reinhard, target, B-Dec, nine o'clock, very high."
Schlüssel, acting much like an automaton, pressed the button for the gunner to take over the commander's selected target. He announced, "Got it," then began to lead the Posleen ship.
Prael began to search the database for the next best target; began and stopped when he saw something incoming that was moving too fast and in the wrong direction to be a target.
"Scheisse," he said. "Incoming! Johann back us up . . . fast!"
Mueller, understanding the note of desperation in Prael's voice, immediately threw the tank into reverse. Though the tank's superb suspension and almost incredible mass sheltered the other crew from any real feeling for the destruction, Mueller's sensitive and knowing hands on the controls felt every crumbled building and even the pulverization of the town's simple and thoughtful monument to her Great War and World War Two dead.
There was little left of the center of the tiny, picturesque farming town of Grosslangheim once Brünnhilde had backed through. The shock of the impacting KE projectile shook the rest of the town to its foundations.
Rinteel, too, was shaken and sweat-soaked. He had been somewhat untroubled by the occasional sniping Brünnhilde had done early on. He simply did not consider, would not let himself consider, the sentient beings on the receiving end. Brunhilde's railgun simply launched projectiles into space or sky and that was the end of it, as far as the Indowy's mind would permit.
The material coming back, "incoming" as the human crew said, was another matter entirely. Brünnhilde picked up, but deamplified, the thunderous crashing. So too, she gave the crew, at reduced sound levels, the sense of impact when a KE projectile hit. The tank could do nothing to reduce the shaking and rocking of the tank from a near miss; the Indowy found himself tossed and bruised by the ill-fitting straps of his battle station.
"I've got a hydraulic leak in right track section three," Mueller announced. "Not bad but increasing. Inboard."
"Rinteel, see to it. Schmidt, go with him and assist."
Ignoring the two-being human and Indowy team unbuckling themselves and crawling along the floor of the tank to an access panel that led below, Prael asked, "Reinhard, have you got target on that fucker yet?"
"Just a second . . . coming . . . almost . . . AHA!" Brünnhilde shuddered again with the release of another KE round. Instantly the hydraulic elevator and rammer fed another round to the railgun's launch rack. Schlüssel waited for the fiery bloom that confirmed a hit before firing another round.
Already Prael was searching the sky for another target for his gunner.
Beneath the tank, the cobblestone streets of Grosslangheim cracked and splintered.
Roman soldiers and citizens had once walked the city's streets. Feudal knights had held tourneys for her folks' entertainment. Gutenberg, of movable type fame, had been born and raised there. Smashed in the Second World War, modern Mainz, still retaining much of its medieval charm, had arisen, phoenixlike, from its ruins.
Mainz would never rise again. Blasted by everything from space-borne kinetic energy weapons, to ground-mounted and carried arms, to human artillery fired in support of its recent defenders, the city was nothing more than a ruin of ruins. Soon enough, the Posleen harvesting machine would erase even those. Gutenberg's ghost would wander in vain looking for a landmark. Roman soldiers and feudal knights, peasants and burghers, artists and artisans; no trace would remain, all would be forgotten.
Through the streets, dodging and flowing around the chunks of ruined buildings littering them, the Posleen horde marched like a flood. Above, silently, the tenar of their God Kings hovered, ever alert for threshkreen holdouts. There were a few of these, men deliberately left behind or detached from their units and lost amongst the ruins. But so few remained that each shot was met with a torrent of fire; plasma cannon, railgun, even high-velocity missile.
From time to time a storm of shells would fall upon the remnants of a major intersection to splash some small part of the Posleen river like a creek struck with a rock. But, as with water, the Posleen always closed up and continued their flow. There might be thresh ahead, after all.
Mainz—ancient Mainz, human Mainz—was fast disappearing under the yellow tide.
What might have been an easy half day's march, Mainz to Wiesbaden, for seasoned infantry in good order, with an open road, had been a nightmare trudge lasting the better part of five days for the masses of panic-stricken civilians, mostly Germans mixed with lesser numbers of French.
Each night Isabelle and her remaining son had gone to sleep—such miserable, fitful, half-frozen sleep—wherever fate had brought them to that point. Only mutual body heat and the thick blankets Isabelle had ported had kept them alive. Of food there had been none after the bits Isabelle had carried, long since exhausted. Of water there had been little beyond chewed dirty snow and the occasional muddy, chemical-tasting pool or crater. Even Germans required time to plan such a move, she thought, not without a sense of bitter vindication.
But that sense of vindication could not last, not faced with the generosity of the Wiesbadeners who opened their hearts, their homes, and—best of all—their food lockers to the passing refugees. With a belly full, her youngest baby cradled in her arms, in a warm bed in a heated home, with the Rhine River and an army between her and the aliens, Isabelle felt safe for the first time since leaving Hackenberg.
Only recurring nightmares about her other son disturbed her sleep.
Closer to his mother than either of them would have believed possible, Volunteer De Gaullejac, his sergeant, and the battered remnants of their platoon kept watch from a stout stone building looking over the bridge crossing the Rhein. Young Thomas had never imagined such a sea of humanity as he had seen crossing the bridge.
The platoon's job, as part of the company, was to ensure that the bridge did not fall into alien hands. None spoke of it, yet each man knew what it meant. If the aliens showed up it did not matter who was on the bridge—French, German or the Papal Guard, it must be dropped.
Thomas was not sure he could. After all, his mother and little brother might be among those thronging to safety.
A flight of half a dozen tenar, the aliens' flying machines, appeared over the water heading for the friendly side of the bridge.
"They must have slipped around the defenders on the far side," muttered Gribeauval.
The aliens stopped over the river, open targets for all to see and all within range to engage, and turned their weapons on the thronging masses of noncombatants on the bridge.
"Don't shoot boys," Gribeauval ordered. "Let the others handle it. Those aliens are trying to get us to open up. If they do, they'll swarm us, most likely, and the bridge won't be dropped."
Even as the sergeant spoke, from his peephole Thomas saw one of the aliens thrown from his flying sled to fall, arms and legs waving frantically, to the cold waters below. The remainder of the aliens continued to rake the refugees with railgun fire.
Even at this distance, Thomas could faintly make out the shrieks and cries of terror of the civilians under attack. He saw more bodies, human ones, fall to the water. Some, so it seemed from the way they clawed at air on the way down, jumped to certain death rather than stand one more minute helpless under Posleen fire.
The boy prayed that his mother and little brother had already passed safely.
A few refugees, slow but lucky, still managed to worm their way through Posleen lines and make their stumbling passage across the charred-body choked cookhouse that was the Niesse River. Hans had, for a while, sent patrols across to meet and guide any that could be found to safety on the western bank. Casualties among the patrols, however, had been fierce. Within days he had had to order the practice stopped. Any civilians that could find their way across would be welcome. But he would risk no more men on such a fruitless task.
The most recent group, some seven half-starved and completely terrified refugees, were Poles. They were being fed, at Hans' order, under Anna's shelter and from the tank's own stores. A small fire had been built under the tank, as much for morale as for warmth. There was something about a fire, something ancient and beyond words. Hans had one built whenever the tactical situation permitted. The crew would often gather there, to warm their hands by the flickering light. The Poles, too, gathered by it.
Only one spoke any German, and that little he spoke very badly. The man seemed quite frantic to Hans, pointing and gesturing at some new threat, real or imagined, coming from the other side.
Reluctantly, after the Poles had been fed, Hans directed Harz to guide them to the rear. Maybe they did have useful information, maybe they didn't. If so, only one of the interpreters in the rear could hope to ferret it out.
Still, Hans had to credit the intensity of the Pole's frantic and failed attempts at communication. He resolved to order an increased alert level as soon as he returned to Anna's warm hold.
Though the night was cold, Borominskar, standing by and facing a fire, and with a patchwork blanket made of carefully chewed and sewn thresh-pelt, was warm enough. A cosslain had summoned forth the needed skills to make the blanket from his internal store. Going from feed lot to feed lot he had selected the best of the thresh, those with the longest, finest, brightest hair to make this offering to his God. Carefully trimming and cleaning the freshly gathered pelts, the cosslain had chewed them gently for days to make them change from putrescible flesh to soft, long haired, impervious suede.
The fire was warm, pleasingly so. Its random flashes, the sparks and flickering shadows it cast, brought to the Posleen's mind a sense of peace; of relaxation, quiet and ease. Equally comforting, the blanket was bright and fluffy, the thresh would have called its fibers "blonde." It insulated the God King well from the frozen wind, coming unbroken off of the steppes to the east.
The God King found stroking the long, thick fibers of the blanket to be strangely pleasant, almost as pleasant as contemplation of revenge upon the cowardly, never to be sufficiently dammed thresh who had half broken his host.
And the day of that revenge was near at hand.
Borominskar had had a terrible time keeping his Kessentai and their oolt'os under discipline. Hungry, the people were; hungry, frightened and furious at the cowardly thresh's use of floating fire to defeat the last attack. They were also terrified, at some deep inner level, of facing such a death as had befallen their brethren.
The memory of all those oolt'os burning and suffocating in flame, their piteous cries breaking the sky, still made Borominskar shudder, his flesh crawl.
Still, a few more days and the gathering parties, hungry as they were, would have gathered enough living thresh to make Borominskar's plan work. The thresh had shown no pity for his people. They might have some for their own.
"The pity of it is," said a sleepy Mueller to an exhausted Schlüssel, "with just two of these, we would be three times more effective. With a half a dozen, the enemy could be hunted as if by a wolf pack, and destroyed before they could mass effective return fire. A half dozen like our 'girl' here, and the Posleen could not live over Germany."
"Yes," agreed Schlüssel. "And then our cities would not be smashed from the air, our fortifications would have held longer, maybe indefinitely, and the poor bastards on the ground would have a better chance."
"Is there any chance of getting at least a second Model B Tiger?"
"No, Johann," Prael interrupted. "The information is on the Net for download; the factory and most of the raw material are being moved to one of the Sub-Urbs in Switzerland. But that process is going to take months to complete the move and prepare for manufacture. No telling how long before they begin to produce."
"The Swedes?" Mueller asked.
"They have the plans," answered Prael. "They have the raw materials. They even have some railguns we shipped to them and all of the plans for Tiger A and B, both. But, again, more months, perhaps as long as a year, until the first model rolls off."
"We do not have a year," Henschel observed from the little cocoon of blankets he had rolled himself into to seek a few moments' rest.
Each day in the Tiger seemed like a year of normal time to Rinteel. Besides the constant work, work, work keeping the beast running, work which, because of his dexterity, skill and instincts fell more and more upon the Indowy's broad shoulders, there was the ever present danger, the psychic torment whenever he let it get through to him that this tank, this crew, were gleefully slaughtering sentient beings.
At least he wasn't hungry, as he had been for a few days when the food he had carried aboard ran out. He had managed to cobble together a food synthesizer in an unused space between Brünnhilde's fighting compartment and the exterior hull. It stood right next to what the human crew had dubbed "the Nibelung's still."
Rinteel found himself growing more and more dependent upon the product of that still. Through the long days and nights of battle, he had come to seek its relaxation—even the oblivion it could provide taken in excess quantities—as a respite from the horrors he endured.
He noticed too that the German crew never lost a chance to loot any alcohol they could find in any abandoned town. Though, being German and therefore almost as neat as an Indowy, the trail behind the über-tank was marked by neat piles of amber and green bottles anywhere Brünnhilde had found a half a day's safety to stop and rest.
Right now the tank sat idle and quiet under a thick blanket of camouflage foam and snow. She needed resupply, she needed maintenance, and she needed them now.
Fortunately, the trucks carrying spare parts, ammunition and food had already begun to queue up, under cover of the snow-clad woods nearby. Already the first of the ammunition trucks was parked beside the massive hull, pallets of ammunition being lifted by Brünnhilde's external crane and stowed below.
While resupply was ongoing, below a large crew of mechanics worked repairs to the massive yet intricate mechanisms of the tank. Still others gauged and, in teams, tightened track, checked the suspension, or performed any number of other tasks required under the fleeting supervision of Rinteel.
The Indowy had nothing to do with the resupply. Instead, he spent his time alternating between rest, food, drink, repairs and reading the manual. Much of the sleep was catch as catch can. The food was usually wolfed down. The drink imbibed served to relax him enough, if just enough, to sleep. The repairs were never ending.
And the manual was . . . obtuse.
The shallow valley of the Niesse was covered in dense thick fog. Anna's thermals could pierce the fog easily, of course, and to a considerable distance. Even so, Hans had left his operations officer in charge below, seated in the command chair to view the screen and keep watch over the rest of the area via his virtual reality helmet.
Hans, instead, stood in the commander's hatch atop the turret listening for . . . he knew not what. There were no targets for the artillery, not given that observers could not see through enough of the fog to justify using shells that were becoming slightly harder to find than they had been. There was no rifle fire from the near bank, nor railgun fire from the Posleen. Only the occasional rumble from fore or rear told of artillery laying down sporadic "harassment and interdiction," or H and I, fires.
H and I fires could be said to be the price one pays for making the enemy's life miserable and uncertain . . . and keeping him from becoming too bold.
Hans' mind dialed out the artillery's intermittent rumbling. His eyes he let go out of focus. His ears, enhanced by the same process that had returned him to youth, strained to find something, some hint or sign, of what had so terrified that Pole.
His ears, enhanced or not, picked up nothing. Hans cursed the fog that kept him from seeing.
Borominskar cursed the damnable weather of this world. He needed for the humans to be able to see!
And he needed them able to see well . . . and soon. All his plans depended on the threshkreen being able to see what they were facing. Only that, the God King was sure, would take his host to the far bank and beyond.
Would this fog never lift? Would he be forced to feed his host on the thresh gathered, to feed them before the thresh had fulfilled their purpose? The thought was just too depressing. Already he had ordered the male thresh so far gathered slaughtered to feed his oolt'os. That was of little moment. But he needed the young and the females to see his purpose through to completion. If the fog did not disappear within a few days, Borominskar knew he would have to order the slaughter of even these.
The God King tried to relax. Unconsciously his hand reached to stroke the thick, soft pelt of the blanket that warmed his haunches.
Frustrated and half frozen in the fog, Hans left the commander's hatch and descended by the Anna's elevator to the heavily armored, and properly heated, battle deck below.
"Commander on deck," the 1a announced, quickly vacating Han's command chair.
Wordlessly, Hans took the chair and placed his VR helmet on his head. The crew, their battle stations, the main view-screen, all disappeared instantly.
The helmet took its input directly from Anna. Where all was clear she used her external cameras to send clear images. Where only her thermal, radar and lidar vision could reach she supplied what could only be called a best guess. In those circumstances, the images she projected were somewhat simplified, iconic and even cartoonish.
"Anna," Hans whispered.
"Yes, Herr Oberst," the tank replied in his audio receivers.
"I am sorry, Anna, I was talking to someone else."
"Yes, Herr Oberst."
Hans' hand stroked the little package in his left breast pocket. Anna, I have a very bad feeling about tomorrow. No, not that they will defeat me here. That, they will do, eventually, anyway. But there is something going on, something different . . . something I do not think my men can face. I wish so very much you could be here with me. I think you were always as much braver and smarter than I as you were better looking. And I am alone and afraid.