The pit of Hans' stomach was a leaden brick. Anna's view-screen told the entire crew more than they wished to know. The Posleen horde advanced to the shallow and now frozen river . . . and about half of the aliens carried or prodded ahead of it a human captive.
Though the aliens and their captives were in easy range, few human defenders—and those mostly the snipers—fired upon them. Here and there Hans saw a Posleen stumble and fall, its chest or head ruined by a well-placed bullet.
There were none of the aliens' flying sleds in the air. Those, Hans was sure, the defenders would have engaged gleefully, even as the snipers shot down any Posleen to which they had a clean shot.
But it makes not a shit of difference, killing those few. Their numbers are, effectively, endless. And their most powerful weapons today are their captives.
Schultz, sitting below Hans' command chair trembled, the commander saw. Glancing around the battle cocoon, Hans saw that everyone in view, from Harz to the operations officer, looked sick. Harz kept saying, over and over, "Oh, the bastards; the dirty, stinking, miserable bastards."
My boys can't do it. They shouldn't have to do it. We never made them that kind of soldier. Shit.
"Dieter, sit back from the gun. Anna, commander's gun." Relieved beyond words, Schultz sat back from the sight immediately.
"Yes, Herr Oberst," the tank replied. From above, a gunner's suite, almost exactly like Schultz's, descended to encase Brasche.
"Sergeant Major Krueger, take control of the bow guns. All others be on watch for enemy flyers but do not engage. Sergeant Major, engage at will."
With a smile, Krueger began raking the mixed formation of humans and enemy. "Fucking Slav untermensch," he whispered. In the view-screen, men, women and children were ripped apart even as were the Posleen. The only difference was that the human's cries could be more readily understood.
The sound was more than Hans could bear. It was as terrifying as the sergeant major's glee, and even more hurtful. "Anna, kill external microphones. Operations, pass the word to the other Tigers: only old SS will engage. New men are not to fire upon the horde except in point self-defense."
Seeing that the operations officer understood, Hans commanded, "Load antipersonnel. Prepare for continuous antipersonnel."
The loader pressed the required buttons. From Anna's ammunition rack hydraulics withdrew a single canister cartridge and fed it to the gun.
"Feed it to them, Reinhard, feed it to the bastards."
"Hit!" announced Schlüssel, as a small new sun formed and deformed thirty kilometers up.
"Mueller, hard right."
Even held securely as he was by his straps, Rinteel felt the sudden, jarring turn as the driver twisted the tank and raced forward to get out of the expected Posleen riposte. As always, the Indowy was terrified speechless. As always, he was disgusted at the slaughter his human comrades were inflicting upon the Posleen when he allowed himself to think upon it.
And yet . . . and yet . . . familiarity had dulled the fear. The disgust was severe still, but not the paralyzing force it had been. It was a remarkable thing to the Indowy, to be not so afraid as the situation warranted. More remarkable still was it to be less disgusted by the slaughter his mind envisioned. He was finding he could face both fear of dying and fear of killing a bit better than he had ever imagined.
And, too, Rinteel was discovering that he could kill, had killed, vicariously and without any moral dilemma. After all, though it was the crew that fired the gun, it was he, Rinteel, who made sure that gun was in full operating order. And he thought, And though it is the humans who actually fight the Posleen; it is we, the Indowy, who build them the weapons to fight with. How pure we think ourselves, how above the blood and slaughter. Yet that slaughter would be impossible without us. A foolish people mine, to think that distance from murder turns it into something besides murder.
God, I was a soldier, not a murderer. Do you hate me so much then, that even this sin I must commit.
Hans' loader, eyes fixed on the screen before him, announced, "Up!"
Through his helmet's VR, Hans looked upon the frozen-over river. He could see that Krueger's bow guns were having an effect. He could also see that effect was not enough.
Hans' vision fixated on a screaming little blond Polish girl held firmly in the grasp of an alien.
Look at the little girl, Brasche. You have killed hundreds of people in your life, maybe thousands. You tried to think they were all armed enemies. Yes, on how many villages did your fire fall, villages containing little girls like that one? On how many did you call artillery? For how many did the armored spearheads of which you were a part open the way for the Einsatzgruppen? You are already a murderer ten thousand times over.
What are a few thousand more, after all?
Hans thought, Anna, forgive me. If this causes me never to come to you, forgive me please. Hans' finger pressed the firing stud.
Thomas' hand hesitated over the detonator. He could see the bridge. He could see, too, the horde of aliens crossing on it. But he could also see and hear the mass of French civilians the aliens drove among and ahead of them. Again and again the young French soldier tried to force his hand to complete the circuit. Again and again he failed.
Nearby, Sergeant Gribeauval fired his rifle at the crossing aliens.
"Damn it, boy, blow the bridge!" he screamed.
The boy stammered, "I . . . I . . . I can't, Sergeant."
"Merde," the sergeant said. He was barely keeping the leading Posleen away from the wires that connected the detonator with the explosives affixed to the bridge, just barely. He couldn't get away from his firing position long enough to set off the charges without risking that those charges would be made ineffective in that time. "Boy, drop the bridge!"
"Sergeant, I am trying . . . but . . ."
Gribeauval turned from the firing position. "Merde! Just do it!"
Thomas looked at the sergeant, wide-eyed and fearful, just in time to see Gribeauval's head explode from a Posleen railgun round. The boy was flecked with the sergeant's blood and brains. Morally frozen as he had been, his terror left him utterly paralyzed.
And, while the boy was so paralyzed, the leading Posleen tore out the demolition's wiring.
Isabelle trembled with fright. People passed by the field hospital, fleeing to the north. The staff was in turmoil, in a shouting, screaming panic.
The enemy was over the Rhine.
With shaking hand Isabelle made a call to the house she lived in with her son. Briefly, she told her hosts the terrible news, then asked them to see that her boy was dressed and sent to her. They promised they would do so.
Medical orderlies carried away on stretchers those wounded that the doctors thought had some chance. As a truck was filled with wounded it headed away to some unknown destination to the north. Yet the supply of wounded was so much greater than the supply of trucks.
Around her was the din of dozens of moaning, wounded soldiers. A doctor walked among them, announcing, "Routine . . . Urgent . . . Expectant."
That was the dread word: "Expectant." Expected to die.
"Mon dieu, Doctor, what are we going to do for those poor boys we can't evacuate?"
"We have hiberzine for some of them, the ones we might have some small chance of saving," he answered. The doctor's mouth formed a moue. "But we really don't have very much of it. Most will have to be abandoned."
Isabelle went white. "Abandon them? To be eaten? My God, no, Doctor. We must do something?"
"What do you suggest Madame De Gaullejac?"
"I don't know . . . but something, surely. Oh, my God . . . I don't know."
Then her eyes fell upon a field cabinet she knew contained syringes and various medicines, painkillers mostly.
"There are better ways to die, Doctor, than being eaten, are there not?"
Following her gaze to the cabinet he answered, "There are if you are strong enough. I tell you though, madame, I am not."
I must be strong, insisted Hans as he fired yet another round of canister into the mixed Posleen-human mass. He found that he was unconsciously unfocusing his eyes to spare himself a clear view of the carnage he had been, and was, causing.
They had changed firing positions three times now, Anna and her crew. From each position Hans had sent out two to three canister rounds, each shot effectively obliterating most Posleen and human life from an area of roughly one million square meters.
There had only been so many human shields available to the Posleen along this sector. Once Hans cut those down the infantrymen along the river's edge found they were able to do their jobs. In this sector the attack was being stymied.
But a quick glance at the general situation map told Hans that this was very nearly the only sector where that was true. The red-shaded portions of the display showed that the enemy was already in and among the defending infantry over more than half the front.
Other markers on the display showed Brasche that neutron bombs were being expended wildly. Tens of millions of Posleen, and even some humans, were receiving a dose of radiation that would leave them quaking, puking, shitting, choking and all-too-slowly dying caricatures of living beings within minutes.
And none of it would make any difference. This front was broken . . . and all Hans' murder in vain.
Mühlenkampf spoke into a speaker phone lying on his desk. The Posleen had still not succeeded in inconveniencing the Bundespost's telephone system, though the vicious fighting taking place scant miles to the south did interfere slightly with the conversation.
The field marshal's voice held an utter weariness to match that of his civilian chief. "No, Herr Kanzler, there is nothing I can afford to send to reinforce the east. Even with what I have here, I am unlikely to hold. Herr Kanzler . . . the demolition on the bridge between Mainz and Wiesbaden failed. And the enemy has established several dozen lodgments on this bank besides. They pulled the same trick they used in the east, only crossing under a shield of children here. Most of the men could not shoot . . . would not anyway."
"Then alles ist verloren?" asked the chancellor. All is lost?
"There are still tens of millions of our people, and those of our allies, to save to the north and south, Herr Kanzler. And the Army will pay whatever price we must to give you the time to evacuate them to the mountains and the snows. So no, Herr Kanzler, all is not lost, not while we can save our people."
"I will give the orders, Field Marshal Mühlenkampf. Cover the evacuation as best you can."
While his staff worked on the plans for delaying the Posleen advance and moving the headquarters back, Mühlenkampf thought it a good time to visit the front here in the city. Accompanied by his aide, Rolf, and half a dozen guards he set off in a Mercedes staff car.
People were fleeing afoot, by vehicle, and by bus.
Yet not everyone was fleeing. Mühlenkampf noticed a young soldier, sitting in apparent shock on a set of stairs leading from the sidewalk to a house. The boy's eyes seemed fixed on some spot below the surface of the Earth.
"Stop the car," he ordered.
Once the Mercedes had come to a halt by the side of the street the field marshal exited and then walked the few short steps to stand in front of the boy. He saw the boy could not be more than fifteen, at most, though grime and exhaustion would have made him look older to a less experienced officer. The cuff band on the soldier's winter uniform coat said "Charlemagne."
"What is your name, son?" Mühlenkampf asked in quite good French.
Without looking up from whatever private hell he contemplated, the boy answered, "Thomas De Gaullejac."
"Where is your unit?"
"Dead? Fled? I don't know." Still Thomas did not look up. "I just know my sergeant died. And then I was the only one left. And that I was supposed to blow the bridge and . . . didn't." Low as it was already, with those words Thomas' head hung lower still."
"Aha," said Mühlenkampf. That is one mystery cleared up. "Why didn't you detonate the bridge, young man?"
Thomas closed his eyes tightly. "There were people on it . . . men . . . women . . . some children. They could have included my mother and brother. And so I just couldn't. I tried. But my hand wouldn't move. I can fight. I did fight. But I couldn't kill all those people. Even though I tried."
The boy began quietly to cry then.
"Damned if I can blame you for that, son," sighed Mühlenkampf. And what you need right now is a chaplain or a psychiatrist. Possibly both. "Come with me."
Thomas went along, even though some part of his mind wondered if it was only to attend a quick court-martial and slow hanging.
Nothing in Mühlenkampf's demeanor, though, seemed threatening. The field marshal helped Thomas to his feet and led him to the car. "Rolf, take the car and two guards and see this boy to the nearest field hospital for the Charlemagne Division. Can you find that?"
Rolf consulted a laptop that he never left behind. He answered, "Yes, sir. No problem. There's one about six miles from here. Though traffic may be a little tight."
"That will be fine," said Mühlenkampf. "Meet me back here in . . . say . . . two hours. The guards have a radio for me to communicate with Headquarters. They and I are going to have a little tour of the front lines."
Wounded were still pouring in from the front. Many were fixed, to the extent they could be fixed, on the spot, before being sent back to the slaughter. Others were marked for evacuation or for being left behind.
To these, as to the others she had previously helped, Isabelle brought syringes filled with a powerful morphiate, a guaranteed overdose. For those who were awake she simply left a syringe. For the unconscious ones with an awake comrade nearby she asked if the comrade would assist.
And then she came to a ward tent holding one lone soldier with no comrades . . . and no arms. The soldier was conscious though faint, pale from shock and pain and loss of blood. Even so, he understood instinctively what the woman was offering and understood he could not accept it as offered.
"Can you help me?" he asked, weakly.
Her first instinct was to turn around, pretend she was there on some other business. But that would have been cowardly and she knew it. She walked and stood next to the armless soldier's cot.
He was awake enough, if only just, to read her face and the moral confusion drawn upon it. It was a grave and terrible responsibility she had taken upon herself, a responsibility the soldier did not envy her. He tried to help her as best he could. "Madame, I am in great pain. Could you give me something . . . ?"
She knew as well as did he the game he was playing, but, since it made her task easier, she played along. "Certainly, young man. I have something for pain right here."
Her finger flicked the needle as the thumb of the opposite hand forced out any air that the syringe might have contained. Then she stopped as she realized she had never given anyone an injection anywhere but in the arm.
He twisted his head slightly in the opposite direction. "They have been using my neck," he advised.
Isabelle searched for a vein, found it, and forced the hair-thin needle into it. A slight withdrawal of the plunger confirmed she had pierced the vein well, as blood from the vein was drawn into the syringe. She pushed some of the syringe's content into the vein.
And then she stopped pressing. You cannot do this, Isabelle. This is murder.
The soldier helped her again. "That feels a little better, madame, but I am still in great pain. Could I have some more?"
Again, Isabelle pressed another quarter of the syringe's drug into the vein. But again, she stopped before reaching a fatal dosage.
"I think, madame, that I will still be in unbearable pain until you give me all of it."
Isabelle looked deeply into the soldier's eyes. She was not sure if she were looking for confirmation that the soldier wished to die then and there, or confirmation that he did not. The eyes gave no answer; between his injuries and the amount of drug she had already given him, they were simply too dull and blank.
" . . . all of it, madame, please? The pain . . ."
Shutting her own eyes then, Isabelle slowly forced the rest of the syringe's contents into the young man's neck. She waited there, eyes closed and unmoving, for several minutes as the horror of what she had done washed over her. When she opened them again and withdrew the needle, she saw that the soldier's eyes had closed, that his breathing had gone shallow. In a few minutes, under Isabelle's gaze, the breathing stopped entirely.
Then, eyes full of tears and heart full of sorrow, she fled, leaving behind the now empty ward tent.
Thomas was not alone in the reception tent of the field hospital, but he was ignored by the people bustling to and fro.
That was fine by him; he wanted to be ignored. He did not want to answer any questions, and he did not want any of the people here or in the city to know it was his fault that they had to leave their homes and stations and flee for their lives.
Finally an old noncom stood before him, asking, "Grenadier Thomas De Gaullejac?" Seeing the boy's distant nod, the NCO continued, "We are admitting you on the advice of Field Marshal Mühlenkampf's aide. But we cannot treat you here. The psychiatric section has already displaced to the rear. So, for that matter, has the chaplain. You are to go find yourself space on one of the trucks waiting outside and go with them. Do you understand?"
Wearily Thomas nodded again. Then he stood and walked out of the tent to where the trucks awaited.
Isabelle never even noticed the slump-shouldered, filthy soldier leaving the reception tent as she hurried across it on her way to her own ward. She likely would not have even had her eyes not been tear-filled and swollen with weeping. She had to focus on returning to her own place of work to pick up her youngest boy.
Upon her eldest, Thomas, she refused to think. He was almost certainly lost. The same innocent and sweet son she had raised would never have survived alone in the nightmare their world had become.
Mühlenkampf, his party down to himself, a radio bearer, and a single guard, waited at the same place from which he had dispatched Rolf with the young French boy.
Bad, so bad this situation is. Worse than anything I have ever seen, to include the Russian Front. They are chewing through us even faster than the Russians might have. And I need time.
Mentally, he consulted his order of battle and the placement of every unit down to division level. Hmmm. Goetz von Berlichingen is close. Jugend is close, too, but Frundsberg is closer. Frundsberg is Panzer . . . almost useless in these quarters . . . while Jugend is panzer grenadier. And we have two infantry corps within range.
Then again, Jugend has an average age of under seventeen, excluding old SS leadership.
Reluctantly, Mühlenkampf took the radio from its bearer and called his headquarters. "Give me the 1A," he demanded.
After a wait of a few minutes the radio came back, "Generalmajor Steinmetz, here, Herr Feldmarschall."
"Steinmetz? Mühlenkampf. Pass the warning and prepare the orders. Twenty-first and Fortieth Korps, reinforced by SS Divisions Goetz von Berlichingen and Jugend respectively, are to attack, without regard to losses, to drive the enemy back from the city of Wiesbaden."
"I can do this, sir, but are you . . ."
"Just do it, Steinmetz."
"As you wish, sir."
The Indowy Rinteel wished desperately to be somewhere, anywhere, but here in this tank, shuddering under repeated hammerings of the Posleen landers that pressed in their attack like nothing Rinteel had ever imagined.
There had been no powerful direct hits of course; Mueller's deliberately spastic driving made a kinetic projectile strike a matter of, so far happy, chance. The near misses rocked the tank viciously, however. The Indowy's body had been bruised, bruises over bruises, with every jolt.
There had been plasma hits, more than a few. Yet Brünnhilde's ablative armor had been able, so far, to shrug those off. A quick glance at his damage control screen showed Rinteel, distressingly, that that armor was wearing thin in places.
Thin too, the Indowy thought, was wearing the courage of the crew. In continuous action for more than twenty-four hours—for the enemy had come looking for the tank from space a bit before their successful assaults across the river lines, the crew had begun to exhibit signs of something very like the Indowy equivalent of the Darhel's lintatai.
Though with the Indowy it was a cultural and physical issue, not a genetic one.
He looked around the tank's combat cocoon at the crew, trying to analyze those almost inscrutable un-Indowy faces. All glistened of sweat, sweat pulled forth by fear.
Prael, living and fighting under the desperate pressure of a command he had never trained for, but for which he had so far proved more than suitable, had developed a twitch in his cheek. Even to an alien to whom German was worse than a merely foreign tongue, Prael's vocal commands to the crew had acquired a nervous, half-mad tone.
Schlüssel's hands, gripped tight on his gunner's spade-grip, trembled, Rinteel saw. He had not been able to so much as pull his face from the gun's sight for over six hours. The previous break in his concentration? Well, the Indowy couldn't recall it.
Breitenbach, whom the Indowy suspected to be the youngest of the crew, sat shaking. Yet the young man's eyes never left his engagement screen, his hand still stayed fixed to his cannon's control handle.
Henschel, running the loader's station, seemed to retain an old being's calm, as did Nielsen of the humongous feet. The others of the crew did as best they might.
And the Indowy was, wonder of wonders, terrified and disgusted and admiring all at once. He wished himself to be like the humans, too; able to be terrified and brave all at once, to quake at the heart with fear and still to make the hand and eye steady when it counted. What an amazing species, marveled the little bat-faced, furry, Indowy. If we must have an overlord species—and unless we ever learn to fight, and we can't, we must—then we could do worse than to serve these humans.
In twenty-four hours the crumbling line had been driven back more than twenty-five kilometers. Three times in the last day Hans had ordered his brigade to turn about and lunge back at the enemy. Three times they had driven the Posleen eastward, fleeing in terror. Three times they had carpeted the frozen earth with a blanket of dismembered and crushed enemy bodies.
Yet, each such lunge had also seen the enemy return, in numbers uncountable, pressing at the front and oozing around the flanks. Each such lunge had left a Tiger or two smoking on the East Prussian plain.
The enemy had chosen, so far, not to risk its ships. Hans Brasche smiled grimly for a moment at this mute testimony to the fear in which the Posleen held his much-weakened brigade of Tigers and their lighter comrades.
Out in their vehicles, the lighter troops—Leopard tankers and panzer grenadiers in their Marders—smiled, too. They smiled at being alive, which they would certainly not have been, most of them, had not their brigade commander's tank ignored the Posleen's human shields and blasted both humans and aliens to kingdom come.
On other sectors of the front, so the word had been passed, some units had completely disappeared under the alien wave because no one had been able to bring themselves to fire on women and children until it was too late. Great gaps had been torn in the front, gaps that the Germans and their Polish and Czech allies were struggling to repair.
Each attempt at repair seemed to find the front ever more westward.
Hans was facing eastward when Anna's voice called to him, "Emanations from thirty-eight enemy ships heading this way, flying low, Herr Oberst."
Hans maintained his smile after hearing that news. Action, something to take his mind from his recent crimes, was a welcome relief.
Borominskar cursed futilely at his misguided and insubordinate underling. "You foolish abat! You incarnate insult to your forebears! You never sufficiently to be cursed, thrice-damned idiot! Turn back."
"Up yours, old one," answered the younger God King, Siliuren of Sub-clan Rif. "The enemy is broken and my people are hungry after the long fast you inflicted upon them. I am going to grab my own place in the sun of this world and to the shit-demons with you!"
Not bad odds, thought Hans. Not bad odds at all. We have faced worse in any case, much worse.
Losses had forced Hans to consolidate his three battalions of Tigers into two. Even those two mustered only ten tanks apiece. Curiously, his Leopard and panzer grenadier units were much nearer full strength. It was the drawing of the enemy fire away from the lighter units and towards us that spared so many of them, I think.
The twenty-one remaining Tigers, including Anna, waited patiently under their camouflage foam for the Posleen to enter engagement range.
Hans spoke into his microphone to the entire brigade. "The important thing here, boys, is that there is no ground for us to hide behind. If we engage too soon then the enemy will pull back and just pelt us from out beyond our effective range. So we have to let them come in close. Dial down your antimatter and wait until the bastards are within five thousand meters. Then, when I give the command, fire for all you are worth. There are thirty-eight of the swine coming. I don't want more than two or three to get away to spread the word among the others: 'Don't fuck with 'Brigade Michael Wittmann!'"
Siliuren of the Rif chortled at his defiance of his nominal overlord. What, after all, meant it to be a God King of the People of the Ships if one couldn't exercise the freedom inherent in that status? If he chose to load his oolt in their ships to a new land on his own, by what right could Borominskar object? It certainly had not been because of the care with which he had fed the people; Siliuren's oolt'os were thin to emaciation by their enforced short rations.
The God King viewed the snow-covered land passing beneath his ship with a certain measure of disgust. It is a bare place, and inhospitable. Why ever did I leave the world of my birth?
An honest answer to that question would have been something on the order of, "You left your world because it was about to be blown to flinders, radioactive flinders at that." An answer more honest still, though Siliuren was not among either the brightest or the most devout of the People and so unlikely to have read or listened with understanding to the Book of the Knowers, would have been, You left your world because it was about to be destroyed, but it was about to be destroyed because in eons past beyond clear memory, some people called Aldenat' decided that the universe ought to be a certain way and, for a while, were able to make it look that way.
God, if there is a God, please, if the aliens look, do not let them see. So Brasche prayed and so, if perhaps using different words, prayed every man of the brigade.
Whether a distant God, scarcely in evidence on the Earth as it was, was paying attention, or the Posleen ships' masters were not paying attention, the swarm of alien ships flew closer and closer to the irregular waiting line of Tigers, Hans never knew. He only knew that the time eventually came when he was able to order, "All Tigers, Fire. Fire at will."
Siliuren of the Rif barely noticed the voice of his ship's AI. Indeed, the ships never put into their artificial voices any intonation that might have been characterized as attention grabbing.
It wasn't until the third time the ship said, "There appear to be twenty-one enemy fighting machines ahead," that the God King asked, "WHAT?"
It was the last question he ever asked.
"First and Third Battalions, bend in your flanks," ordered Hans. "Let's trap as many of the bastards as we can. Little brothers,"—the brigade's panzers and panzer grenadiers—"cover our flanks until we are done."
The Brigade Michael Wittmann, much reduced in strength but not one whit in fighting heart, not one whit in their hate, rolled forward to its last victory.