Through the long days and nights the stream of people fleeing the Posleen hordes never completely let up, though night, weather, and enemy fire occasionally caused it to slacken. Thomas marveled that so many could have made it out of the west to safety here.
He knew one reason why so many civilians were still pouring over to safety. To meet and pass the flood of refugees, a thin continuous column of gray-green clad men and boys crossed in the opposite direction, an offering of military blood to save civilian blood.
"It's the Germans, boy," pronounced Gribeauval. "Give the bastards their due. When their blood is up, when it really matters, they know how to die."
Thomas knew this was so. He knew it from the eerie flares illuminating the town of Mainz to the southwest, and from the red tracers that flew upward to meet those flares after ricocheting off of some hard surface. The German boys—boys no different from himself and his mates—still fighting and dying to hold an arc around the bridge and around the hundreds of thousands of civilians still waiting the word to cross to the north, wrote grim testimony to their own courage and determination to hang on to the bitterest end.
"Read this," said Gribeauval. "It just came in . . . a radio message from some corporal over there."
Thomas read:
"There are seven of us left alive in this place. Four of us are wounded, two very badly, though each mans a post even so. We have been under siege for five days. For five days we have had no food. In ten minutes the enemy will attack; we can hear him massing now. I have only one magazine left for my rifle. The mines are expended. The machine gun is kaput. We are out of range of mortar support and I cannot raise the artillery. We have rigged a dead-man's switch on our last explosives to ensure our bodies do not go to feeding the enemy. Tell my family I have done my duty and will know how to die. May the German people live forever!"
Thomas felt unwelcome tears. He forced them back only with difficulty. So gallant, so brave they were, those boys over there fighting and dying against such odds, and with so little hope.
Gribeauval, seeing the boy's emotions written upon his twisted face, said, "Yes, son; give them their due. They are a great people, a magnificent people. And we are damned lucky to have them, now."
Thomas agreed. And more; he thought of himself, alone, trying to save his mother and little brother from the alien harvesting machine. He wished to be a man, was becoming one, he knew. But alone he could never have made the slightest difference for his family's survival. That took an army, an army of brave men and boys, willing to give their all for the cause of their people.
Perhaps for the first time, Thomas began to feel a deep pride, not so much in himself, but in the men he served with, in the army they served, and even in the black-clad, lightning bolt-signified, corps that was a part of that army.
Thomas was learning.
"Save that message, son. Keep it in your pocket. The day may come when you need a good example."
Isabelle had wanted to set a proper example. So, though she had no medical training, she had been married to one of France's premier surgeons. Much of medical lore she had picked up as if by osmosis, across the dinner table, at soirees, from visiting her husband's office. She thought she might be able to help, with scullery work if nothing else. And she knew to be clean in all things and all ways around open flesh.
She thought, at least, she could follow that part of the Hippocratic oath which said: "First of all, do no harm."
Once assured that the Wiesbadener family would see to her youngest, once she saw him learning this new language, this new culture, she had made inquiries and set out on her quest.
It had been difficult. For the most part, if Germans learned a foreign language it was much more likely to be English than French, a long legacy of cozying up to new allies and away from ancient enemies. In time, her own badly spoken, high school German had seen her to a French-staffed military hospital. She was surprised to see the Sigrunen framing the red cross, surprised to see the name in not Roman but Gothic letters: Field Hospital, SS Division Charlemagne.
"You wish to join as a volunteer?" the one armed old sergeant had asked.
"Oui. I think I may be of help. But, to help, monsieur, not to join. You have already taken one of my sons. The other needs me."
"Have we? Taken one of your boys, that is? We could certainly use some help . . . well . . . let me show you around. As you will see, nothing here is by the book."
Still reading the manual, that obtuse, damnable, almost incomprehensible operators and crewman's manual, a frustrated Rinteel spoke with the tank itself.
"Tank Brünnhilde, I am confused."
"What is the source of your confusion, Indowy Rinteel?"
Rinteel took a sip of intoxicant from a metal, army-issue cup, before answering. Thus fortified, he continued, "Your programming does not allow you to fight on your own, is that correct?"
"It is correct, Indowy Rinteel."
"It does allow you to use your own abilities to escape, however, does it not?"
"If my entire crew is dead or unconscious, I am required to bring them and myself to safety, yes. But I am still not allowed to fight the main gun without a colloidal sentience to order me to. I can use the close-defense weapons on my own, however, at targets within their range; that is within my self-defense programming. And I may not retreat while I carry more than two rounds of ammunition for the main gun."
"Can't you direct your main gun without human interface?"
"I have that technical ability, Indowy Rinteel, but may still not fire it without a colloidal sentience to order me to."
"How very strange," the Indowy commented, sotto voce.
"I am not programmed to comment upon the vagaries of my creators, Indowy Rinteel."
"Then what do you do in the event escape is impossible?" the Indowy asked.
"I have a self-destruct decision matrix that allows and requires me to set off all of my on-board antimatter to prevent capture. As you know, my nuclear reactors are essentially impossible to cause to detonate."
The thought of several hundred ten-kiloton antimatter warheads going off at once caused Rinteel to drink deeply of his synthesized intoxicant.
A few meters from Rinteel, separated by the bulk of the armored central cocoon, Prael, Mueller, and company toasted with scavenged beer tomorrow's adventure while going over plans and options.
"The big threat, so far as I can see," commented Schlüssel, "is the bridgehead over the Rhein."
"I am not sure," said Mueller. "The Oder-Niesse line is a sham; it must be."
"For that matter," added Henschel, "we still have infestations within the very heart of Germany. Oh, they are mostly contained, to be sure, but if we could help eliminate one we could free up troops that could then move and eliminate another."
"The problem is," said Prael, "that none of the troops containing those infestations have any heavy armor to support us. If we get caught alone in a slogging match we . . . well, Brünnhilde has only so much armor, and not that thick really anywhere but on her great, well-stacked chest."
"There are A model Tigers to provide support along the Oder-Niesse," observed Mueller.
Prael consulted an order or battle screen filched by Brünnhilde's nonpareil AI and downloaded for his decision making. "Yes, Johann, but so far as we can tell they don't need us. The whole Schwere Panzer Brigade Michael Wittmann is there, and they are not alone. Along the Rhein it is a different story. The retreat from the Rheinland was disastrous. Many Tigers were lost. We are most needed there, I think."
"So, then," said Henschel, the oldest of the crew, "it is to be 'Die Wacht am Rhein.'"43
Rinteel was somewhat surprised to hear a faint singing coming from the open hatchway to the battle cocoon. Not that singing was unusual, of course. A few beers . . . a little schnapps . . . and the crew was invariably plunged into teary-eyed, schmaltzy Gemütlichkeit.44
The surprise was the words and tune. He had never heard this song before, and he would have bet Galactic credits that he had been subjected to every German folk and army song since he had joined the tank's crew.
The words were clear, though, and the melody compelling. Rinteel heard:
A voice resounds like thunder peal
Mid clashing waves and clang of steel.
The Rhine, the Rhine the German Rhine,
Who guards today thy stream divine?
Dear Fatherland no danger thine,
Firm stand thy sons along the Rhine.
Faithful and strong the Watch,
The Watch on the Rhine . . .
Below his window, marching by the city's streetlights, the weary but upright battalion of "Landsers"45 sang:
They stand one hundred thousand strong
Quick to avenge their country's wrong.
With filial love their bosoms swell.
They'll guard the sacred landmark well.
Dear Fatherland, no danger thine . . .
Where was this spirit? Mühlenkampf thought bitterly, looking down from his perch. Where was it back when it could have made a difference?
Don't be an ass, Mühlenkampf, the general reproached himself. The spirit, deep down, was always there. No fault of those boys that their leaders were kept from bringing it out.
The general sighed with regret, contemplated the economic disruption of the Posleen infestations . . . contemplated, too, the increasing shortage of ammunition, fuel and food. And now, he sighed, spirit is all we have left in abundance.
Mühlenkampf turned away from the window and back to the map projected on the opposite wall. Slowly, all too slowly, he was pulling those units of his which had covered the withdrawal from the Rheinland back to a more central position. Casualties? Who could number them? Divisions that had been thrown into the battle at full strength were, many of them, mere skeletons with but a few scraps of flesh hanging onto their bones. The replacement system, now running full tilt, could add flesh . . . but it took time, so much time. And there was only so much flesh to be added, so much meat available to put into the sausage grinder.
Some of that sausage-bound flesh, in the form of the infantry division marching to the front to be butchered, sang under Mühlenkampf's window.
Looking into the marching boys' weary but determined eyes, the general felt a momentary surge of pride arising above his sadness and despair. Perhaps you are lemmings, as I judged you, my boys. Perhaps you are even wolves when in a pack. But you are wolves with great hearts all the same, and I am proud of every one of you. You may not see another day, and you all know it, yet still you march to the sound of the guns.
While Mühlenkampf watched the procession below, the sun peeked over the horizon to the east, casting a faint light upon the marching boys.
The rising sun made the fog glow but could not burn it away. In that glow, standing and shivering in the commander's hatch, Hans glowered with frustration. Something is so wrong over there, and I have not a clue what it is.
Hans had, four nights previously, ordered a renewal of the nightly patrols. This was not, as in days recently past, to help to safety Poles fleeing the aliens' death machine. Instead, he had put his men's lives at risk for one of the few things in war more precious than blood, information.
Afoot where the water was shallow enough, by small boats where this was possible or by swimming where it was not, the patrols had gone out, eight of them, of from eight to ten men each. Hans had seen off several of these himself, shaking hands for likely the last time with each man as he plunged into the river or boarded a small rubber boat.
Yet, as one by one the patrols failed to report back within the allotted time, Hans' fears and frustrations grew stronger.
Other commanders along this front had had much the same idea. Though Hans didn't know the details, over one hundred of the patrols had gone out. He didn't know, either, if even one had returned. Only brief flare-ups of fighting, all along the other side of the rivers told of bloody failure.
Success is sweet, thought Borominskar as reports trickled in to him of one slaughtered group of humans after another. What effrontery these creatures have, to challenge my followers on land fairly and justly won by them.
"Fairly" might have been argued. "Justly" no Pole would have agreed with. But that it was "won" seemed incontrovertible. The deaths of one hundred human patrols, nearly a thousand men, admitted as much.
David Benjamin admitted to nothing, especially not to the notion that the war was hopeless or that the patrols were doomed
An experienced officer of the old and now destroyed Israeli Army, he took the ethos of that army to heart: leaders lead. In a distant way, Benjamin knew that that lesson had not been learned so much from their deliberate and veddy, veddy upper-class British mentors but from the unintentional, middle-class, German ones. Add to this an officer and NCO corps that was more in keeping with Russian practice than Western—many officers, few NCOs of any real authority—and there had really been only one thing for David to do.
The patrol he led had crept in the dense fog to near the banks of the Niesse River. There they had inflated their rubber boat, then carried the boat in strictest silence to the water's edge. The men, Benjamin in the lead, had hesitated for only a moment before walking into the forbidding, freezing water. The shock of that water, entering boots, leaking through even thick winter uniforms, and washing over skin, had rendered each man speechless. It was as if knives, icy knives, had cut them to the heart.
But there was nothing for it but to go on. As the lead men found their thighs awash they had thrown inboard legs across the rubber tubing at the front of the boat. The rear ranks still propelling the boat forward, the second pair had thus boarded, then the third, then the final. As each pair boarded the men took hold of short, stout paddles previously laid on the inside of the rubber craft.
Finally, the boat drifting forward, Benjamin gave the command in softest spoken Hebrew, "Give way together." The men dug in gently with the oars, quickly establishing a rhythm that propelled the boats slowly forward.
Up front, David and his assistant patrol leader, a Sergeant Rosenblum, used their paddles also to push away any of the sharp bits of ice that might have damaged the boat. Once, when the horrifying image of a burned and frozen Posleen corpse appeared out of the fog, David used his paddle to ease it over to sink into the murky depths of the stream.
Once gaining the far side, Benjamin leapt out, submachine gun at the ready. Meanwhile Rosenblum pushed a thin, sharpened metal stake into the frozen ground, made the boat's rope fast, and then helped the others ashore.
The last two men were left behind to guard the boat, the patrol's sole means of return to friendly lines.
Rosenblum and the other four waited briefly while Benjamin consulted his map and compass—the Global Positioning System was long since defunct—and pointed a direction for Rosenblum, taking the point, to follow.
The patrol passed many Posleen skeletons, but few full corpses. David and the others pushed away thoughts of their families back in lost Israel, pushed away especially thoughts that those families were, most of them, long since rendered like these Posleen corpses and eaten.
Benjamin faintly heard a horrified Rosenblum whisper, "Not even the Nazis . . ."
Past the broad band of corpse-laden Polish soil the patrol emerged into an area of frozen steppe. Here, Benjamin elected to return to the edge of that band to rest for the day.
Normal camouflage would have been a hopeless endeavor. Instead, staying as quiet as possible, the men created three small shelters of humped-up Posleen corpses and remnants of corpses. Under these, at fifty-percent alert, the six men slept and watched through the short day of Polish winter.
Many times that first day of the patrol they heard the growls and snarls of Posleen foragers. Twice, the foragers came close enough to make out faintly in the fog. On those occasions, sleep was interrupted and the men went to full alert.
"Something is bothering me about them," whispered Benjamin to Rosenblum.
"What is that, Major?"
Rosenblum thought for a moment, trying to determine just what it was that seemed wrong. Then it came to him, "They are looking for the merest scraps of food, rotten food at that. It is as if they were starving."
"Well," answered the sergeant after a moment's reflection, "it is winter, after all. The harvest . . ."
"They can eat anything, to include the harvest gathered a few months ago, and to include any winter wheat still standing. They can eat the grass and the trees and Auntie Maria's potted geraniums. But why should they when there were so many Polish civilians trapped or captured? It doesn't seem logical somehow."
Though the increasing light told of a sun risen halfway up to noon, the fog still held the front in its grasp. A few dozen half frozen men had made it back by now, never more than one or two per patrol, though. The men told Hans' intelligence officer—when they could be made to give forth something like intelligent speech from frost-frozen lips and terror-frozen minds—that it had been hopeless. The Posleen were too thick on the ground, too intent, to penetrate through to their rear and whatever might be lurking there.
As he had for many a day, Hans Brasche cursed the fog in his mind.
The God King's hand stroked the warm, light blanket covering him. He had not thought to send out counterpatrols. Indeed this whole human intelligence gathering activity seemed to him faintly perverse. It was not the Posleen way to skulk through the night and fog, avoiding detection. Rather, the People rejoiced in the open fight, the deeds done before the entire host for the Rememberers to record and sing of unto future generations.
But, happy instance, on this occasion, necessity had provided what Borominskar's own brain had not. Searching for scraps of food amidst the slaughtered of the previous battle, his host had inadvertently provided a thick screen against the threshkreen's cowardly snooping. And, hungry as they were, the scattered bands of the People had every reason to concentrate on the loose bands of threshkreen wandering the steppe. Only thus could their hunger be assuaged given the severe rationing imposed on the host by Borominskar's decree.
It was nice to see something working for a change.
Well, the Path is a path of chance and fortune, after all . . .
Fortune favors the bold. Benjamin remembered that as the title of some motion picture he had seen once with his wife, in happier times. It was true then, and was no less so now.
At nightfall the band set forth again to the east. There were fewer Posleen patrols once past the strip of corpses from the prior battle. What bands there were were easily detectable from a distance by the light from their campfires. These Benjamin and his men skirted, taking a wide berth. These diversions David also recorded on his map.
The next sunrise saw the patrol twenty kilometers deep into Posleen-controlled territory, at a desolate and deserted little Polish farming village. Not that the people had abandoned their homes, no. Their fleshless skeletons dotted the town's streets and littered its dwelling places. But the souls were fled, the food was gone. All of Rosenblum's scrounging revealed nothing more nourishing than a few bottles of cheap vodka.
Benjamin's men subsisted that day on their combat rations, German and thus as often as not containing despised pork. Well, many Israelis did not keep kosher. And for those who did? Necessity drove them to eat what was available.
Perhaps the vodka, parceled out, helped overcome their dietary scruples.
Harz drew the duty of feeding the commander. Filling a divided tray with a mix of Bavarian Spätzle, rolls and butter, some unidentifiable greens and some stewed pork, one hand grasping a large mug of heavily sugared and mildly alcohol-laced Roggenmehl46 coffee, he stepped onto the one-man elevator that led to the other topside hatch and commanded, "Anna, up."
Still listening and peering into the gloom, Hans seemed not to notice as Harz emerged from the automatically lifted hatch and left the tray beside him. Harz stood there for a while, leaving Brasche alone with his thoughts. Finally, he made a slight coughing sound to get the commander's attention.
"I heard you emerge," Hans answered.
"Lunch, Herr Oberst," Harz announced.
"Just leave it there, Unteroffizier Harz. I'll get to it when I have time."
"Sir, I must remind you of the wise Feldwebel's words. 'Don't eat . . . '"
Interrupting, Brasche finished the quote, " . . . 'when you're hungry, eat when you can. Don't sleep when you're tired, sleep when you can. And a bad ride is better than a good walk.' I've heard it before, thank you, Harz."
"Yes, sir. But it is still good advice."
"Very well, Harz. Just leave it. I'll see to it in a moment. Return to your station."
An order was an order. Harz didn't click his heels, of course. That habit even the reconstituted SS had not readopted. But he did stand at attention and order, "Anna, down." The hatch eased itself shut behind him.
Alone again, Hans picked up the tray. The Spätzle, the vegetables, the rolls and butter he ate quickly. Then, pulling the collar of his leather coat tighter around him, and grasping both hands around the steaming mug, he peered once again into the fog.
Hans' earphones crackled with the intelligence officer's voice. "Sir, they want you down by the river."
With outstretched hand a cosslain offered Borominskar a fresh haunch straight from the slaughter pens. It was a meager thing, not more than half a meter long, by threshkreen measures. But the God King had decreed no meat for the cosslain and the normals, and scant meat for the Kessentai. The thresh must be saved for the nonce.
Had they looked, the setting sun would have shone bright into the eyes of the traveling group of Posleen. That might have been all that saved the patrol from the keen alien senses. Had the accompanying Kessentai, flying five or six meters above and slightly behind the party, checked his instruments they might have told him there were wild thresh about.
What can they be saving them for? wondered Benjamin, at the sight of yet another small band of humans, apparently healthy and well fed, being herded to the east by Posleen showing ribs through thinned torsos. Any sensible, any normal group of Posleen would have long since eaten those prisoners and gone looking for more.
Even amidst Poland's flatness there were interruptions: waves in the soil, trees, towns. It was from one of these, another deserted town atop a low, slightly wooded ridge running north-south, that the Israeli patrol watched the slow progress of the Poles and their Posleen guards.
Not one man of the patrol was of direct Polish ancestry. None but would have, had they delved into Polish-Jewish "relations" over the preceding several centuries, felt bitterness or even hate. Yet Benjamin spoke for almost all when he announced, "We're going to free those people, tonight."
"There are twenty-four of them," cautioned Rosenblum, "and a God King. Pretty steep odds, boss. And how are we supposed to move one hundred people thirty kilometers back to the river and then ferry them across, without getting caught? Major . . . I'd like to help them but . . ."
"But nothing. We are going to do it. And I know just how."
The stars shone here, five or more kilometers beyond the thick fog which still rose nightly from the Oder-Niesse valley. The half-moon did as well.
The human prisoners huddled in the center of an alien perimeter. That perimeter, two dozen Posleen normals, half facing in, half out, seemed slack somehow, the aliens' heads drooping with apparent hunger or fatigue.
Above, circling endlessly, the lone God King's tenar traced a repetitive path, moving on autopilot, between those normals facing in and those facing out. The Kessentai's own head drooped in sleep, his crest flaccid.
Rosenblum, carrying the team's one sniper rifle—a muzzle-braked, straight pull action, Blaser 93, chambered to fire the extraordinary Finnish-developed .338 Lapua magnum cartridge—took in the entire scene through his wide-angle, light-amplifying scope. The sergeant's job was to kill the God King, no mean feat at nine hundred meters with a moving target.
"And don't, Don't, DON'T hit the power matrix," Benjamin had warned. "It will kill all the Posleen, but all the people as well."
Rosenblum had promised to do his best, while privately promising himself that if it came to his comrades' survival, or that of the Poles, the Poles would, sadly, lose.
The sergeant's ears were covered with headphones connected to his personal, short-range, radio. This was his sole hearing protection and, firing the Lapua, it was barely enough.
In any case, the major had his patrol on radio listening silence. Who could tell what the aliens might be able to sense?
Listening, creeping slowly as a vine, stopping to listen some more before creeping forward again; this was the universe of Benjamin and his men.
There were sounds to cover their movement, human cries of nightmare, Posleen grunts and snarls, and the ever steady whine of the tenar. Benjamin had counted on these to move his team quickly to within a few hundred meters of the enemy.
Now, however, they were too close for quick movement. It fell to creep, listen, then creep some more.
Benjamin, with two men and carrying all the team's six claymore mines, moved to the right of a line drawn between the abandoned town and the Posleen-human encampment.
The claymore was nothing more than an inch-thick, curved and hollow plastic plate. Seven hundred ball bearings lay encased in a plastic matrix to the front. One and one quarter pounds of plastic explosive lay behind the ball bearings. Cap wells atop allowed the emplacement of blasting caps into the explosive.
The claymore was often considered a defensive weapon and had often been derided by the ignorant as yet another inhuman "antipersonnel landmine."
Neither was quite true. Though the claymore could and often was used as a sort of booby trap, so much could be said for a hand grenade; a weapon the aesthetically sensitive had, so far, not targeted for its attentions. Indeed, so much could be said of a tin can filled with nails and explosive and wired for remote detonation. For the most part, though, claymores were used to help protect manned defensive positions, and were command detonated rather than left for a wandering child to find.
Yet they did not have to be used defensively. The claymore could also be used to initiate a raid, giving instant fire superiority to an attacker while decimating the defense in the same instant.
For claymores could be aimed, and had predictable zones of destruction. Moreover, these zones of destruction were twofold, near and far, with a wide safe area in the middle. Properly aimed, to graze upward out to fifty meters, the claymore would butcher an enemy to that distance. Thereafter, however, the rising ball bearings flew too high to harm a standing man . . . until they reached about two hundred to two hundred fifty meters away, at which point their trajectory brought them back down to a man-, or Posleen-, killing height. Benjamin's plan depended on this.
Sixty meters away the sleeping Posleen stood like the horse it somewhat resembled. To Benjamin it looked and sounded asleep, its snarls and faint moans those of a dog having a bad dream, its head hanging down slightly.
About ten meters past, and offset to one side, the inward-facing Posleen guard seemed likewise to be dozing.
Carefully, oh sooo carefully, Benjamin emplaced the claymore onto the ground. He had tried forcing the pointed legs down into the frozen soil but with no success. Instead, separating those legs to form two shallow upside down Vs, he simply laid it on the ground, twisted his head to bring an eye behind it and fiddled until he had a proper sight picture.
Fifty or sixty meters to either side of Benjamin, the other two men of his party did more or less likewise. When they were finished with the first claymores, the other two crawled further out and emplaced the second, aiming for additional pairs of Posleen guards. Benjamin saved the last claymore for a rainy, or even a foggy, day.
All crawled back as soon as they were finished. The claymore's scant sixteen meters of wire did not suffice for the Israelis to meet at a common point. Trying to daisy chain the claymores, or to link them with detonating cord for central control, Benjamin had deemed an exercise in foolishness, given the nearness of the enemy. Instead, during weary rehearsals conducted earlier in the day, Benjamin had measured the time from separation to emplacement to retreat to firing position. This he had then doubled for safety and added fifty percent to for a bit more safety. Thus, each man had one and one half hours from separation to be returned and ready for firing.
When his watch told him the allotted time had passed, Benjamin lifted his own small radio to his face and queried, "Rosenblum? Machine gun?"
"There is a human radio transmission coming from one hundred and fifty-seven measures to the southeast," the tenar beeped.
"Wha? What!" The Kessentai was awake in a flash, though true alertness and rational thought would take longer. Checking his instruments first to confirm, he took over control of his tenar from the autopilot to which he had delegated it. For a brief moment, the tenar stood motionless in the sky.
"Here," answered Sergeant Rosenblum.
"Take your best shot," said Benjamin, over the radio.
"Wilco," the sergeant answered, settling into final firing position and confirming that his sights were set on the now-motionless God King's chest. His finger took up the slack in the trigger quickly. Then the sergeant continued applying the steady pressure taught to him long ago in a Negev desert sniper course.
The explosion, when it came, came as a surprise.
The God King, just coming to full alertness, felt a horrid jolt that ran from one side of its body to the other and sent waves of shock and pain across its torso. It kept to its feet for the moment, but just barely. Twisting its head to look down at the side from which it thought the first shock had come, the Kessentai was surprised to see a small hole gushing yellow blood. Turning the other way the God King was shocked to see a plate the size of a double fist torn roughly from that side. The God King felt suddenly sick at the image of the damage wrought on its own body.
Its knees buckling, the mortally wounded Kessentai slumped to the floor of its tenar, whimpering like a nestling plucked from the breeding pens for a light snack. Pilotless, the tenar followed its default programming and settled gently to the ground, its bulk causing the frozen grass and soil to crunch below it.
As soon as the sound of Rosenblum's shot carried to him, the waiting Benjamin gave his "clacker," the detonator for the claymore, a quick squeeze followed by another.
The first squeeze had been sufficient however, as it was in almost every case. A small jolt of electricity raced the short distance down the wire to the waiting blasting cap. This, tickled into life, exploded with sufficient power—heat and shock—to detonate its surrounding load of Composition Four plastic explosive.
The C-4 shattered the resin plate containing the ball bearings. Though these did not entirely separate, indeed at least one piece that took off down range consisted of thirteen ball bearings still entrapped together, not less than three hundred projectiles of varying weight and shape were launched.
The near Posleen had its two front legs torn off almost instantly and took further missiles in its torso. It fell to its face. The slightly farther one, facing inward, was struck by one missile in its haunches and another two in its neck. Both shrieked with surprise and pain. The further Posleen took off, bleeding, at a gallop.
From either side of Benjamin came two more explosions. He could only hope that those claymores did their work well.
Little Maria Walewska, eleven years old, was trying to sleep, fitfully, against her mother's warmth. The girl was not awakened by the sound of the alien's flying machine, whining down to rest about twenty meters away, nor even by the distance muffled shot that was the cause of that.
Instead, it was the five distinct flashing explosions that came from the other side of the guarded human "encampment" that brought her from her fitful sleep.
Maria turned her little head in the direction of the explosions, but could see nothing. Something, many things, passed overhead, sounding like a flight of angered bees.
Then she heard the screaming of her guards as the bees descended to strike.
"Human soldiers!" Benjamin screamed repeatedly as he ran forward, submachine gun at the ready. He had his doubts that the words would be understood, was pretty sure—in fact—that they would not be, since they were spoken in Hebrew. But, understood or not, surely the Poles could distinguish human speech from alien and draw the correct conclusion.
Benjamin's first burst of fire went into the nearest of the Posleen guards, the one missing both legs. Its head came apart in a blooming flower of yellow bone, teeth and blood.
To either side of Benjamin the two other Israeli soldiers likewise screamed as they ran. They, too, fired at any Posleen they crossed, seemingly dead or seemingly hale.
It was called, "taking no chances."
"Let's take our chances and run for it," shouted a standing Pole. Without waiting for encouragement the Pole took off to the north. He had not run a dozen meters before one of the guard's railgun rounds exploded his chest. That example was enough to make all who saw fall to the ground and cling tight to Mother Earth.
Nestled against the earth, as soon as Rosenblum saw the God King's body reel from his shot and the sled begin to settle he turned his attention to other, still-standing, Posleen. Automatically, his right hand stroked the straight pull bolt to chamber another round. The machine gun team, engaging from Rosenblum's left front, was bowling over the Posleen on that side of the encampment. Many of them, he saw, acted as if they had been wounded and stunned. Despite their erratic movements, the machine gun team scythed them down.
"Well, volume of fire is their mission, after all," Rosenblum muttered. "But precision is mine."
Whereupon, the sergeant settled his sights "precisely" upon a Posleen guard, then lifting its weapon to shoot at the Poles.
Maria and her mother stared helpless, wide-eyed, and open-mouthed as one of their captors, one already bleeding from a roughly torn hole in its chest, lifted its weapon to spray them. They kept that stare even as the Posleen was struck again by something that traveled with a sharp, menacing crack overhead.
Taking a .338 Lapua from straight on, the alien was thrown back on its haunches, dead in that instant.
Benjamin stopped not an instant while donating a staggering, disoriented, alien a killing burst from his submachine gun. Still shouting "Human soldiers!" at the top of his lungs, he soon reached the edge of the cluster of humans at the center of the encampment. From here on out, he knew, he would have to control his fire more carefully. He shouted out as much to dimly perceived Israelis to either side of him.
Reaching the center of the human circle, Benjamin heard one more crack pass overhead—Sergeant Rosenblum in action. The line of tracers the machine gun had been drawing across his front on the far side of the Poles suddenly ceased. Benjamin looked around frantically for other signs of alien resistance but saw none.
He queried into his radio, "Any of them left?"
The radio answered, "Rosenblum here. I see none standing. . . . Machine gun team. I think we got them all. . . . Bar Lev here . . . none standing . . . Tal . . . scratch one last on this side." Benjamin heard a final burst, Tal's last victim, off to his right.
He issued a final command, "Perimeter security . . . Rosenblum come on down," before settling, exhausted, on his weary, black-clad, Israeli ass.
Under the moonlight, a little blond Polish girl stood before him, her hand outstretched as if wanting to touch her deliverer, though fearing to.
Benjamin smiled and took the girl's hand. Then he stood, picking the girl up, and called out, again in Hebrew unintelligible to the Poles, "To whom does this little girl belong?"
Maria's mother, though still in a degree of shock, came over and took her from Benjamin. She turned away, briefly, before turning back with a sob and throwing her arms around her Hebrew deliverer. Benjamin patted the woman, in no very intimate way, before disengaging.
Rosenblum, his sniper rifle slung, stood on the deck of the grounded tenar. "We've got a live one here," he announced, unslinging the rifle. "Firing one round."
"Wait," ordered Benjamin, not quite certain as to why he hesitated. Possibly he just wanted to see one of the hated invaders in agony. He threaded his way among the mostly still-prostrate Poles; then joined the sergeant at the alien's sled.
Looking down he saw a badly, almost certainly mortally, wounded God King, leaking its life's blood out onto the deck. The alien moaned, eyes open but poorly focused. From somewhere on the sled itself came the chittering, squealing, snarling and grunting sounds Benjamin presumed to be the aliens' tongue.
"Pity the creature doesn't speak Hebrew, or we Posleen," Rosenblum observed.
At that the tenar's grunting and squealing redoubled for something over a minute. When it subsided the machine announced, "I can now."
It was too late, and the exhaustion of combat too profound, for Benjamin to be surprised at this. It had been a war of wonders all along, after all.
Instead he asked of the alien machine, "What is this one saying?"
"The philosopher Meeringon is asking you in the name of the Path and the Way to end his suffering."
"Philosopher?" Benjamin queried. "Ah, never mind." He thought for a minute or two before continuing, "Tell this one we will grant his request . . . for a price."
The Israeli waited while the machine translated. "'The demand of price for boon is within the Way,' Meeringon says."
"Good. Ask Meeringon, 'Why?'"
The body of the mercifully killed God King cooled beside the tenar; Benjamin had been as good as his word.
"Go back to the boat," he ordered Rosenblum. "The machine says it will carry you without problem. Once there use the boat to get to the friendly side. Don't risk trying to cross on this machine; they'll blast you out of the sky on sight. When you get there, find someone higher up than me. Pass the word of what the Posleen have in store. Set up a retrieval for these civilians if you possibly can. We should be along in a couple of days."
"Sir, you really should be going, not me. You can explain this better."
Benjamin took a look at Maria and her mother, then swept his gaze across the other Poles. "Sometimes, Sergeant, one really must lead from the rear. Now go."
Just my fucking luck, thought Rosenblum, standing in the freezing fog in a trench on the Niesse's western bank. Just my luck to run into these fucks. Though he shared the basis of the uniform with the German SS, he did not share a language and felt an almost genetic hatred of them.
Still, he had to admit the bastards were polite, sharing their food and cigarettes with the half-frozen Jew with the Mogen David on his collar rather than their own Sigrunen. Another SS-wearing man entered the trench. The Germans seemed both pleased and anxious to see the man appear from the fog.
Thus, unable to communicate with the Germans, Rosenblum was surprised when he heard the new arrival say, in perfect Hebrew with just a trace of accent, "My name is Colonel Hans Brasche, Sergeant. What news have you from the other side?"