Watch on the Rhine

Fredericksburg, VA, 11 November 2004

Snow flecked the cheeks and eyebrows, falling softly to cover a scene of horror with a clean white blanket. White snow fell upon, melded into, the hair of a man gone white himself. He was stooped, that man. Bent over with the care of ages and the weight of his people resting on his old, worn back.

The Bundeskanzler[2] turned his eyes away from the gruesome spectacle even now being covered by snow. Bad enough to have seen a once vibrant and historical city scoured from the face of the earth as if it had never been. Worse to see the roll of casualties… such crippling casualties… from the army of a state in every way more powerful than his own. The Kanzler trembled with fear for his country, his culture and his people.

Yet, as badly and as plainly as he trembled, the nausea of his disgust was in every way worse.

Fearing to look at his aide, the Kanzler whispered, “It’s the bones, Günter. It’s the little piles of gnawed bones.”

Günter, the aide — though he was really rather more than that, heard the whisper and grimaced. “I know, mein Herr. It’s disgusting. We… we have done terrible things in the past. Horrible, awful, damnable things. But this? This goes beyond anything…”

“Do not fool yourself,” corrected the Kanzler. “We have been worse, Günter, far worse. We were worse because what we did, we did to our own. Cities burned away. Lampshades. Soap. Dental gold. Einsatzgruppen. Gas chambers and ovens. A whole gamut of horror visited upon the innocent by our ancestors… and ourselves.”

“And Dresden?” answered Günter, with a raised eyebrow and a sardonic air. “Hamburg? Damstadt?”

“I didn’t say, my young friend, that we were alone in our guilt.”

The Kanzler blinked away several snowflakes that had lodged themselves in his gray eyelashes. “And… after all, what is guilt of the past?” he sighed. “Do our own young people now need to be destroyed because of what their grandfathers did? Is it right for our children to be eaten, to be turned into little piles of bare, gnawed bones? How far does the sin of Adam and Eve go, Günter?”

Straightening that old and worn and overburdened back, the Kanzler announced, “In any case, it doesn’t matter. Whatever we have done, nothing deserves this… this abattoir. And whatever we can do to prevent it… that shall I do.”

Günter, the aide, scratched his chin, absently. “But what we can do, we have done. Production of everything we need for defense or evacuation is proceeding apace. The old soldiers of the Wehrmacht[3] have been remobilized, what there were of them, and are being rejuvenated. The conscription is in legal force, and exempts only those who conscience cannot abide military service. We are doing all we can.”

“No, my young friend,” answered the Kanzler, slowly and deliberately. “There is one resource yet we have not touched. One that I would never have touched, myself, before seeing this nightmare with my own eyes.”

One resource? One resource. What could the Kanzler mean? Suddenly Günter’s eyes widened with understanding. “Mein Herr, you can’t mean them.”

Tightening his overcoat about him in the cold, reaching up a hand to brush away yet more of the steadily falling snow, the Kanzler looked skyward as if asking for guidance. Not receiving any, still with eyes turned heavenward, he answered, definitively, “Them.”

The chancellor thought, but did not say, And anything else I must bring back to prevent this from happening to our cities, our people.

Paris, France, 13 November 2004

The crowd was immense; its intensity, palpable. One among half a million protest marchers, Isabelle De Gaullejac felt as she had not since her happy and carefree days as a Socialist Youth.

Though past forty, Isabelle was yet a fine looking specimen of womanhood. Typically French, she had retained her slender shape. Her shoulder-length brown hair was untouched by gray. And if her face had a few more wrinkles than it had had as a young college student, the sidelong glances of men old and young told her she had not lost her appeal.

Then it had been the Americans she had protested; them, and the war they had inherited from France. Now it was France she protested against, France and the war it had seemingly inherited from the Americans.

She was sure, certain, that it was all the Americans’ fault. Had the aliens, these Posleen, attacked Earth first? No. Foolishly, at American behest, the French Army had gone to the stars, looking for trouble and becoming involved in a fruitless war, against a previously unknown alien civilization.

And for what? To save a crumbling federation of galactics?

France’s business was here, on Earth, looking after French people.

And now they were talking about increased taxes? To help the common people here? Again, no. It was to grease the wheels of the war machine that the money was needed. Isabelle shuddered with revulsion.

More revolting than higher taxes for lesser purposes, the talk was that universal conscription was about to be expanded. She looked at her two young sons, one held with each hand, and vowed she would never permit them to be dragged from her home to be turned into cannon fodder in a stupid and needless war.

Isabelle’s voice joined that of the thronging masses. “Peace, now… peace, now… PEACE, NOW!”

Berlin, Germany, 14 November 2004

Word had spread; Günter had ensured it would spread.

As the chancellor entered the Bundestag, Germany’s upper legislative body, he saw a sea of mostly neutral faces, sprinkled with those more hostile or, in a very few cases, even eager. He wasn’t sure which group he feared more — the left that was going to raise a cry for his ouster, or the new right that might raise a cry for him to assume a title he loathed, “Führer.”

No matter. He could only persevere in his course and hope that the great mass of legislators would see things as he did. To help them see he knew he must show them.

As he took his seat the chancellor made a hand motion. Immediately the lights dimmed. Almost immediately thereafter a movie screen unrolled from the high ceiling.

For the past four days a specially selected team of newsmen and women had been assembling a documentary using mostly American but also some few other sources. It had been America, however, which sensed a need for Germany to continue as an ally, that had been most willing and able to provide the team of German journalists with everything needed to complete their mission.

Nothing had been censored, no holds had been barred. The German legislature was about to be kicked full in their collective teeth with the horror about to descend upon their country.

Annemarie Mai, Green and Socialist representative from Wiesbaden, had been among those unutterably hostile to the Kanzler’s idea. As the film began to roll she was by no means displeased to see Washington, DC, in ruins. American policies, from their cowboyish adventures in imperialism to their wasteful and destructive energy and environmental policies to — most damning — their insistence on an outdated economic system that had the infuriating habit of making her own preferred statist system seem inefficient; all these made Washington a loathsome symbol of all she despised about America.

Like many in the world, however, Annemarie liked Americans, as people, just as much as she hated their country.

And so her reaction to much of the rest of the film was quite different. Little children gone catatonic with fright at having seen their parents butchered and eaten before their eyes made Annemarie weep. More horrid still were the children not gone into oblivion, the ones shown who screamed and cried continuously. These made the legislator quiver with terror.

And then there were the soldiers, with their sick, dirty and weary faces. They were white enough to seem no different from the boys and girls of Germany. The shrieks of the wounded, especially, tore at Annemarie’s heart.

And then came the piles of meat-stripped bones, human bones, along with separate piles of neatly split skulls, some of them very small indeed. These sent Annemarie running for the ladies’ room, unable even for a moment longer to keep down her gorge.

“You must think very little of the strength of the democratic spirit in German hearts to be so concerned about the dangers of rejuvenating twenty or twenty-five thousand old men,” the chancellor told a group of hecklers, shouting slogans from the gallery.

If his words had any effect on the hecklers it was something less than obvious. Their chants of “No more Nazis. No more Nazis,” even seemed to grow a bit in volume and ferocity.

“They were not always old men,” answered one of the legislators. “When young, as you propose to make them again, and when armed and organized, as you propose to make them again, they were a menace, fiends, thugs, criminals… murderers.”

“Not all of them,” the chancellor insisted. “Perhaps not even most. Some were drafted into the war. Others found no place in the Reichswehr and went, as soldiers will, to whichever military organization they could find that would accept them. And I intend that no one, not even one, who has been convicted, or even reliably accused, of a war crime or a crime against humanity shall be permitted to join.”

“They were all guilty of crimes against humanity,” the legislator returned. “Every one of them who fought in the unjust war this country waged against an innocent world were guilty.”

“Were this true,” said the chancellor, mildly, “then equally guilty would be Heinz Guderian, Erich Manstein, Erwin Rommel, or Gerd von Rundstedt. They actually did the higher level planning for that war. The people I propose to bring back were low-level players indeed compared to those famous and admired German soldiers.”

“They murdered prisoners!” shrieked another legislator.

“In that war everyone murdered prisoners.”

And so it went, seemingly endlessly. Opponents spoke up; the chancellor answered mildly. Proponents spoke up, usually mildly, and opponents shrieked with fury. In the end it came to a vote… and that vote was very close.

All eyes turned to the ashen-faced Annemarie Mai as she mounted the speaker’s rostrum. The tie was hers to break, one way or the other. With the images of split children’s skulls echoing in her brain she announced, “I have conditions.”

“Conditions?” asked the chancellor.

“Several,” she nodded. “First, these people are the bearers of a disease, a political disease. They must be quarantined to ensure they do not spread their disease.”

“To get any use out of them, I have to use them as a cadre for others.”

“I understand that,” Annemarie answered. “But that group, once filled up to the military body you desire, must be kept as isolated as possible lest the disease spread beyond our ability to control.”

“Then we are agreed,” the chancellor said.

“Second, they must be watched.”

“They will be,” the chancellor agreed.

“Third, they must not be allowed to preach their political creed, even in secret.”

“The laws against the spread of Nazi propaganda remain in effect and have served us well for decades.”

“Fourth, you must use them, burn them up, including, I am sorry to say, the young ones we condemn to their ‘care.’ ”

“That much I can guarantee.”

“Then, I vote yes. Raise your formation, Chancellor.”

The peace of the assembly immediately erupted into bitter shouts and curses.

Babenhausen, Germany, 15 November 2004

There is peace in senility, for some. For others, the weakening of the mind with old age brings back harsher memories.

Few or none in the nursing home knew just how old the old man was, though, had anyone cared to check, the information was there in his file. Among some of the staff it was rumored he was past one hundred, yet few or none of them cared enough to check that either. Though he was almost utterly bald, shriveled and shrunken and sometimes demented, none of the staff cared about that. The old man spoke but rarely and even more rarely did he seem to speak with understanding. Sometimes, at night, the watch nurse would hear him cry from his room with words like, “Vorwärts, Manfred… Hold them, meine Brüdern…” or “Steisse, die Panzer.”

Sometimes, too, the old man would cry a name softly, whisper with regret, hum a few bars of some long-forgotten, perhaps even forbidden, tune.

It was whispered, by those who washed him and those who spoke with the washers, that he had a tattooed number on his torso. They whispered too of the scars, the burns, the puckermarks.

Everyday, rain or shine, bundled up or not as the weather dictated, the staff wheeled the old man out onto the nursing home’s porch for a bit of fresh air. This day, the fresh air was cold and heavy, laden with the moisture of falling snow. What dreams or nightmares the cold snow brought, none ever knew — the old man never said.

At the front door to the home, a matron pointed towards the old man. “There he is.”

Another man, one of a pair, clad in the leather trench coat that marked him as a member of the Bundesnachrichtendiest — the Federal Information Service, Germany’s CIA — answered, “We shall take care of him from here on out. You and your home need trouble yourselves no further.”

Unseen, the matron nodded. Alles war in ordnung. All was in order. Already the two men had turned their backs on her and focused their attention fully on the old man. They walked up to him, one crouching before the wheelchair, the other standing at the side.

The croucher, he in the trenchcoat, spoke softly. “Herr Gruppenführer? Gruppenführer Mühlenkampf? I do not know if you can understand me. But if you can, you are coming with us.”

Some faint trace of recognition seemed to dawn in the old man’s watery, faded blue eyes.

“Aha,” said trench coat. “You can understand me, can’t you? Understand your name and your old rank anyway. Very good. Can you understand this, old man? Your country is calling for you again. We have need of you, urgent need.”

Berlin, Germany, 17 November 2004

And my, my don’t those two seem urgent, mused the patron of the gasthaus nestled in an alley not far from where that patron lived. As was his normal practice, the patron sat in a dim corner, nursing a beer. And when will the Gestapo, under whatever name they chose to go by, realize that those coats mark them for what they are as clearly as my Sigrunen — the twin lightning bolts — used to mark me.

The objects of the patron’s attention walked from table to table, from customer to customer. The Wirt, the owner and manager of the establishment, looked discreetly at the elderly man, dimly lit in a corner. Shall I tell them?

The patron shrugged. Machts nichts. “Matters not”. You know what they are as well as I do. If they want me they will find me.

Nodding his understanding the Wirt called to the two. “If you are looking for Herr Brasche, that’s him over there in the corner.”

The patron, Brasche, watched with interest as the two men approached. When they had reached his table, he raised his beer in salute. “And what can I do for the BND today, gentlemen?”

“Hans Brasche?” one of them asked, flashing an identification.

“That would be me,” Hans answered.

“You must come with us.”

Brasche smiled. If he was afraid, neither of the men who had accosted him, nor any of the other patrons, would have known it. He had never been a man, or a boy, to show much fear.

Times were hard and getting worse. The calendar on the wall said 1930. As the boy entered the bare cupboarded kitchen, the expression on the mother’s face fairly shrieked “fear.”

“Your father wants you, Hansi.”

The boy, he could not have been more than ten, suppressed a shudder. This was always bad news. He steeled his soul, raised his ten-year-old head, and walked bravely to where his one-armed father — more importantly, the father’s belt — awaited him. He knew he could not cry out, could not show fear; else the beating would be worse, much worse.

Afterwards, when the long beating was over, the boy, Hans, walked dry-eyed past his mother, his walk stiff from the bruises, the welts, and the cuts.

The woman reached out to her son, seeking desperately to comfort him in his pain. All she felt was his shudder as her hands stroked his bruises and wounds. “Why, Hansi? What did you do wrong?”

The boy, he was tall for ten but not so tall as his mother, hung his head, buried his face in a maternal bosom and whispered, “I do not know, Mutti. He didn’t say. He never says.”

“He was never like this before the Great War, Hansi, before he lost the arm.”

The boy could not cry, that had long since been beaten out of him. He shrugged. The mother could cry… and did.

Later, in a Mercedes, one of the pair said, “I must say, you are a cool one, Herr Brasche.”

“I am old. I have seen much. I have never seen where being afraid, or showing I was if I was, ever did me or anyone else any good. Would it now?”

The other, the driver, answered, “In this case you have no cause to fear, Herr Brasche. We are here to do you a favor.”

Hans shrugged. “I have been done favors before. Little good I had of them.”

The times had changed. Plenty and hope had replaced hunger and despair. From the windows, from the street lamps, on the arms of men and women all over Germany fluttered a new symbol. On the radios crackled the harsh, gas-damaged voice of a new hero.

Hans felt his thirteen-year-old heart leap at the sound of his Führer’s voice speaking via the radio, to the nation.

“Meine alte Kameraden,” began the distant Hitler, and Hans felt his one-armed father, standing beside, stiffen with filial love. “Die grosse zeit ist jetzt angebrochen… Deutschland ist nun erwacht…” (My old comrades… the great time is now brought to pass… Germany is now awake.”)

“You see, little Hansi? You see what a favor I have done bringing you here?”

To that Hans had no honest answer; nothing from his father came without price.

It was a public radio, one with loudspeakers, intended for the address of a crowd. Uniformed HitlerJugend patrolled, keeping order mainly by disciplined example. Not that much example was needed for Germans of the year of our Lord, 1933; they remained the people who had fought half a world to a standstill from 1914 to 1918. Discipline they had, in plenty.

The father observed Hans’ eyes glancing over the uniformly short-trousered, dagger-wielding, hard-faced and brightly beribboned youths.

“Ah, you are interested in the Youth Movement, I see, my son. Never fear. I have arranged for you to be accepted a bit early. They’ll make a man of you.”

Why, how so, father? thought the boy. Do they have stiffer belts? What new favors will you show me, I wonder.

Bad Tolz, Germany, 20 November 2004

“Don’t do me any fucking favors,” snarled Mühlenkampf.

The Kanzler — the Chancellor of the German Federal Republic — ceased perusing the picture of the worn and shriveled shell of a wheelchair-bound man in the file on his desk. He looked up sharply at the brand-new, tall, dark-haired, ramrod-backed and broad-shouldered man before him. To the observer, Mühlenkampf, wearing the insignia of a Bundeswehr major general, appeared no more than twenty. Despite this, there was a harshness about the man’s eyes that spoke of stresses and strains no mere stripling of twenty could ever have undergone.

The chancellor observed, “Amazing, isn’t it, Günter, what taking eighty-four years off of someone’s life will do for his disposition?”

Mühlenkampf snorted in derision. Quickly and determinedly he lashed out. “Fuck you, Herr Kanzler. Fuck all of you civilian bastards. Fuck anybody who had anything to do with dragging me out of that nursing home. Fuck you for giving me a mind back to remember and miss my wife and children with; a mind with which to remember the friends I have lost. Fuck you for sending me back to a war. I’ve had better than thirteen years of war in my life, Herr Kanzler. And never a moment’s peace since 1916. I had thought I was finally past that. So fuck you, again.”

Halfway through Mühlenkampf’s tirade Günter arose from his chair as if to shut this new-old man up. Mühlenkampf’s glare, and the chancellor’s restraining hand, sent the bureaucrat reeling back to his seat.

The chancellor smiled with indulgence. “You are so full of shit it’s coming out of your ears, Mühlenkampf. What is more, you know you are. A ‘moment’s peace’? Nonsense. The only peace you’ve ever known was from 1916, when you were first called to the colors, to 1918, when the Great War ended. Then you had some more ‘peace’ from 1918 to 1923 in the Freikorps… Oh, yes, I know all about you, Mühlenkampf. And then you found the greatest peace from 1939 to 1945, didn’t you? Get off your high horse, SS man. War is your peace. And peace is your hell.”

Mühlenkampf cocked his head to one side. He tried and failed to keep a small, darting smile from his lips. “You missed one, Herr Kanzler. Spain, 1936 to 1939. Unofficially, of course. That was a fun time.”

The smile broadened. Mühlenkampf laughed aloud. “Very well, Herr Kanzler. Whatever you have done to make me young you must have had a reason. What do you want of me? What mission have you for me?”

The chancellor returned the beam. “We have some problems,” he admitted. “How far gone were you in that nursing home?”

Mühlenkampf thought briefly, then answered, “I think I was gone back to about 1921. Speaking of which, what year is it? How am I here? How am I young? How is it I have my mind back?”

“Ach, where to begin? The year is 2004.” Seeing the former officer’s surprise, the chancellor continued, “Yes, General Mühlenkampf, you are a sprightly one hundred and four years old. As to how you have the body and mind of a twenty-year-old? That is an interesting tale.”

The Kanzler had long since decided to be direct; Mühlenkampf was known to have been a direct man. “We are about to be invaded, General.”

“Germany?” bristled the new-old man. “The Fatherland is in danger?”

“Everyone is in danger,” answered the chancellor. “The planet Earth is about to be attacked… actually has already been… by alien beings, creatures from space. As I said they have already begun to land, in the United States and — ”

“Bah! Ami trash. And aliens? From space? Herr Kanzler, please? I was born at night but it was not last night.”

“Not so trashlike, Mühlenkampf. Restrain your prejudices; the last war is long over. And the Ami’s, at least, utterly defeated the first invasion to hit them. Not everyone can say that. Though it cost the Americans frightfully. As for when you were born… well, you were reborn about thirty minutes ago. Contemplate, why don’t you, the implications of that?”

“Ah,” agreed Mühlenkampf, contemplatively.

“But, in any case,” continued the chancellor, “those first landings were small-scale affairs, comparatively speaking. What we are facing, commencing in as little as eight months, are five more invasions, each of them ten to fifteen times more massive. You will be briefed in much greater detail on the nature and numbers of the enemy after we are finished here.”

Mühlenkampf shrugged. He could wait for the details.

The chancellor interlaced his hands in front of his face. “We have a problem though. It is not too much detail for now to tell you that these five coming invasions will come with weapons superior to ours or that they are mostly… infantry of a sort. They will have complete command of the air and space. Each will muster from ninety million to as many as two hundred million combatants.”

“That does sound dire, Herr Kanzler. Five or ten thousand infantry divisions.”

The chancellor had done his time. He knew Mühlenkampf was miscalculating based on human norms for combat forces. The chancellor sighed. “No. They have no support forces to consider. One million of these beings — they are called ‘Posleen,’ by the way — means one million combatants. So no, not thirty or forty or even fifty infantry divisions per million. We are talking about the equivalent of about one hundred thousand infantry divisions, but infantry divisions from a warped scientist’s nightmares, dropping on our heads, all of our heads of course, over the next five years. And we have reason to believe, based on the way these beings act, that Europe’s share will be greater than that of any similarly sized area of the globe — say twenty percent, with the possible exception of what may hit the United States’”

Mühlenkampf considered, then objected, “But that is impossible, Herr Kanzler. No military force can organize like that. How would they feed themselves?”

The chancellor shuddered, remembering piles of small and gnawed bones in the snow. He shuddered and then found the impulse to enjoy giving the shock. “Why Mühlenkampf, they eat us, of course.”

Even the hardened SS general was taken aback by that grim news. “You are joking. You cannot possibly be serious. One hundred thousand infantry divisions, advanced over anything we have? Maybe twenty thousand of them against us? With complete dominance of air and space? And they will eat us, eat everyone, if we lose?”

“Not ‘if we lose,’ Mühlenkampf. When.”

Günter, so far quietly sitting at the chancellor’s side, began to raise an objection, before being hushed by the chancellor. “ ‘When,’ I said, Günter, and ‘when’ is what I meant. Nothing but that kind of desperation would make me put General Mühlenkampf back in uniform. Though I concede there are degrees of losing, some better than others.”

Turning back to the veteran, the chancellor continued, “We let ourselves go, Mühlenkampf. You knew the Communists had fallen?”

“I remember thinking, Kanzler, back when I still had some faculties for it, that although the Communists may have gone under I could no longer tell the difference between a Red Russian and a Green German.”

Günter, a committed Green and a Social Democrat bridled at that.

The chancellor’s party drew much of its support from the Greens. Even so, he had to admit, and would admit it only to himself, that there had once been little difference between the two, at least at the extremes of both movements. And yet…

“General, we Germans are packed into this country like rats. Do you want someone pissing in your drinking water? Well, every piss every German takes ends up there, you know. Do you want our children born deformed and retarded by the things industry dumps in our rivers, or would if we let them? Do you not think we need trees to make oxygen for us to breathe? And if you like to hunt, General, or to hike to enjoy the natural beauty of our country, do you not think those very animals and woodland scenes need a little protection?”

Mühlenkampf shrugged his indifference. “A political fanatic is dangerous no matter if he wants to hang capitalists or to gas Jews or to make economic life impossible, Herr Kanzler.”

“I am no fanatic, SS man,” bridled Günter.

“Neither am I, bureaucrat,” answered Mühlenkampf, coolly. “I am a soldier and I rather doubt the chancellor brought me here to discuss politics. But to my mind a Red fanatic and a Green fanatic are indistinguishable. And Germany has had more than enough of both.”

Ah, well, I didn’t resurrect this man for his modern sensibilities, thought the chancellor. He continued, “Yes… well, be that as it may, after the Cold War ended we, all of us really, chopped our military forces to the bone. Let most of the rest be politicized, demoralized and castrated, too. Why, did you know, Mühlenkampf, that there is a law here now forbidding our soldiers from wearing their dress uniforms in public lest it upset certain types of Gästarbeitern.[4]” The chancellor sighed with personal regret. Currying favor with the left at the time he, himself, had voted for that law.

“All of Germany, before this came up, could field, at most, seven mediocre divisions. Of these, one was almost entirely destroyed on another planet. Filling up that division’s losses, and expanding the remaining six upwards to about six hundred divisions, has proven impossible. We have the weapons; that or we soon will. We have the manpower… available at least. We do not have the trained cadre. We have called up and rejuvenated every combat veteran of the last war we could find except for you and people like you. And now…”

“And now,” Mühlenkampf continued, sensing the truth, “now you need us.”

“Yes. Your country needs you. Your people need you. Your species needs you.”

“What will I have to work with?” asked the former SS man.

“We will fill you up with bodies, good ones, from among the young men we have. For your cadre there are enough, just enough, rejuvenated SS men to make a decent group for a large Korps, about five divisions plus support.”

Mühlenkampf thought immediately of a problem. “You wish to give us regular division numbers? The 413^th ‘Volksgrenadiers’ or something on that order? Regular Bundeswehr uniforms?” The general shook his head, “Herr Kanzler, that won’t work.”

“Why not?”

Mühlenkampf shrugged. “It is hard to explain, perhaps. But take me, for example. I was like Paul Hauser… or Felix Steiner,[5] for that matter. I was a regular first and joined the SS not out of any political convictions, but simply to be in an elite combat organization. And to fight, of course. I think few of the other ranks had very strong National Socialist political convictions, though some did. But one thing we all shared was a pride in the symbols for what they said about us as battle soldiers.”

Mühlenkampf sighed. “And then, of course, we lost the war. Rather badly, as a matter of fact. We went from the top of the heap to the despised of Germany, of the world. Our symbols became shit. People turned their faces away. Our wounded veterans were denied the pensions and care given to other branches of the Wehrmacht not one whit less guilty — whatever guilt means in such contexts as the Russian Front — than we were.

“We lost our pride.” The veteran finished, “And soldiers cannot fight without pride.”

This time Günter was not to be silenced. “Your Hakenkreutzer?[6] Your Sigrunen?”[7] he shouted. “Your Death’s Heads? Those symbols you will never be allowed to show.”

Mühlenkampf buffed fingernails nonchalantly against his left breast for some long moments. All the time he fixed the aide with a deadly stare. “Little man, do not try me. The SS told Himmler and Hitler — and they had the power to have us shot out of hand — to go fuck themselves so often, so many times, I have lost count. We fought the Russian hordes to a standstill across half a continent. We charged into American and British airpower and naval gunfire without demur… even without hope. When all was lost we were still fighting, because that is what we did. Never think, little man, not for an instant, that we can be intimidated by such as you,” he ended, sneering.

“Peace, gentlemen,” calmed the chancellor. “Mühlenkampf, Günter is right to a degree. While, I assure you, there are some people, especially down in Bavaria,” — the chancellor rolled his eyes heavenward — “who would welcome the return of the SS with cheers, most of our people would turn away. Moreover, my own political support might well melt away. I cannot let you have all your symbols. Is there something else?”

Mühlenkampf considered. “Our medals? Reissue them, perhaps in a slightly different design?”

The chancellor wriggled his fingers dismissively and said, “We already are, after a fashion.” Then he thought of the casualty lists from the planet Diess, transferred his wriggling fingers to tap his lips and added, “Mostly posthumously, I’m afraid. Yes, we can do this.”

“And division names,” bargained Mühlenkampf. “Give us any numbers you want. But let us go by our old division names.”

“What?” snorted Günter. “LSSAH? Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler?”

“We had other divisions,” answered the general, coolly. “Wiking? No crimes to speak of to their name. Götz von Berlichingen? A clean record there, too. You said five divisions, Herr Kanzler? Okay… Wiking, G von B… Not Hitler Jugend but just Jugend? Hohenstauffen? Frundsberg? Yes, those five. No crimes there except one attributed to Jugend but as likely to have been committed by 21^st, be it noted, Wehrmacht, Panzer Division. And maybe use some of the others as independent brigades within the Korps.”

“Yes, Herr Kanzler. The medals, the names… uniforms a bit different than the norm. Maybe even the Sigrunen after we have shown what we can do? It is not much to ask for and I can build, rebuild rather, some pride with them.”

Mühlenkampf’s face lit with a sudden smile. “There is one other thing, Herr Kanzler. The SS was perhaps the most cosmopolitan armed force in history, certainly the most cosmopolitan force of its size. We had battalions, regiments, brigades and divisions of Dutch, Belgians, French, Danes, Swedes, Latvians, Estonians… damned near every nationality in Europe. We even had control for a while, though they were not part of us, of one Spanish Division, the Spanish Azul, or Blue, Division. Moslems? Lots. I have no doubt but that, had we won the war and some of the Reichsheini’s[8] wilder schemes for a Jewish Homeland come to pass that there would eventually have been a brigade of the Waffen SS that would have sported armbands reading, ‘Judas Maccabeus.’ Yes, I am serious,” the former SS general concluded.

“Your point?” queried the chancellor.

“Just this. Put out the word. Rather, let me put out the word, and we might have a few more former SS men for cadre than you think. And perhaps some new volunteers as well.”

“What do you get out of this, Herr General?” asked Günter querulously.

“Something you would never understand, bureaucrat.”

Berlin, Germany, 22 November 2004

Not even the view of the stunning, busty and leggy blonde gracing the Tir’s[9] reception room could lift Günter’s spirits. Appalled beyond measure and beyond endurance by the chancellor’s decision to resurrect — even in muted form — the hated Waffen SS, the bureaucrat had decided to do the unthinkable, to give his support to the nominally allied but, he was sure, secretly hostile, Darhel.

Still, the SS? It was intolerable. And that the chancellor had ignored him? Insulting.

Worse, Günter was certain, the chancellor would not stop with the SS. With the SS in hand, owing their allegiance to the Chancellor, the bureaucrat could foresee another dark age for Germany. To date, the Kanzler had depended upon a loose coalition of moderate and left political streams. With the reborn SS in hand, might he not cast aside that dependence? Günter desperately feared it might prove so.

Remilitarization was not the least of it. How Günter had fought to keep the conscription laws somewhat ineffective. Surely no threat could justify dragging unwilling and enlightened young boys from their homes and subjecting them to the brainwashing that, he had no doubt, was the military’s stock in trade. How else but through brainwashing could the military convince sensible young men to do something so plainly not in their personal interest?

Günter, himself, had done his “social year”[10] in something useful to society, assisting in a drug rehabilitation program. He had not wasted that year in some atavistic pandering to a spirit long obsolete.

The future seemed dark, dark.

Günter’s reveries were interrupted by the blond receptionist. “The Tir will see you now, mein Herr.”

Upon entering the Tir’s office Günter was surprised to see several political allies also present, along with one soldier. Their chairs were gathered in a semicircle in front of the Darhel’s massive desk.

The Tir’s German was grammatically excellent, though tinged with a lisp caused by air passing between his sharklike teeth. Even with the lisp, Günter had no difficulty understanding the alien when he said, “Please, Herr Stössel, do sit. I am somewhat surprised to see you after you refused our last offer.”

Taking the chair indicated by the alien’s pointing finger, Günter sat silently for a long moment. When, finally, he spoke he said, “When I refused your offer it was before the chancellor decided to turn Germany into a Fascist state again. Better we should be destroyed than release that horror again upon the world.”

In a voice so tinged with vehemence and hate that he was nearly spitting, one of the other humans interjected, “Germany has always been a Fascist state.”

Günter ignored the speaker. He was himself a Green and while, yes, there was a strong leftist trend within the Green movement, the speaker, Andreas Dunkel, on the other hand, was an outright Red. Every time Günter thought upon the ten trillion marks so far spent on trying to undo the ecological damage the Communists had done to the east of the country, he bristled. Even that enormous sum was inadequate; only time could heal the wounds inflicted on Mother Earth by the Communists.

He bristled now too but, suppressing it, turned his full attention back to the Tir.

“Your species is dangerous,” the Tir said, “and among your species your people are perhaps the most dangerous of all. While the Federation needs you now, in the long run you are as much a danger to civilization as are the Posleen.”

The Tir judged his audience well. Indeed, he had a very complete file on Günter Stössel downloaded into his AID, the Artificial Intelligence Devices only the Darhel produced. Much of Günter’s wait in the reception area had been the result of the time the Tir had needed to study the file.

“The Galactic Federation is a peaceful place, or was before this invasion,” said the Tir, honestly. “Moreover, it is a place where resources are carefully guarded. We produce few goods but of high quality; this is how we keep our ecologies pure.” This last was true enough, but the truth concealed a greater falsehood. Galactic civilization kept resource expenditure low by more or less literally starving the Indowy who made up the bulk of its population, produced the bulk of its admittedly excellent products, and had the least share of its power.

At this point, truth fled for… greener pastures. “We care for our planets,” the Tir lied. “Our projections show that, were humans to be let loose onto the galactic scene, ecological disaster would follow quickly. We cannot allow this. And yet we need your people to defend our civilization. It is a difficult problem.”

“What can I do to help?” Günter asked.

Had the Tir had the slightest clue he was being overheard, no doubt his lies would have been even more carefully couched. So thought Deputy Assistant Clan Coordinator, and Bane Sidhe[11] operative, Rinteel.

Listening to the conversation between the Tir, Günter, and the others in the Tir’s office, Rinteel’s mind kept revolving around one word. Agendas. The Darhel have one. The humans have another. We have still a third. But ours at least leaves the humans free and frees us. Surely they will be difficult to deal with, so violent, so aggressive, so selfish as they are. And yet, so long as the Posleen exist and are a threat, they will need us… to produce their machines of war, to maintain them. They will dominate us, no doubt. Yet my people can have a future in every way brighter under human dominance than ever we have under the overlordship of the Elves. The humans, at least, have some sense of fairness. The Elves have none.

The conversation in the Tir’s office was very difficult for Rinteel to follow. The office was bug proof, the Indowy knew. He had tried to bug it but, alas, without success. The Darhel’s AID, unlike those given to the humans so lavishly, was untapable, at least by any means available to the Bane Sidhe.

But every gate has its fence, every rat hole its exit. In this case it was simple sound. Coming from the speakers’ voice boxes, the sound vibrated the walls of the Tir’s office. These walls in turn caused the air of the surrounding rooms to move. This air, it its own turn, vibrated other walls. In time — and space — the very exterior of the building moved, oh slightly, slightly.

And nearby, and in direct line of sight, a Bane Sidhe listening post picked up those vibrations. A Bane Sidhe computer, constructed by the Indowy but designed and programmed by Tchpth, the deep-thinking “Crabs,” painfully translated these vibrations into speech. The translation required intimate knowledge of each speaker’s voice. The slightest thing could upset it; a cold, a sore throat. And with new speakers the machine was hopeless until examples of their speech could be obtained.

Thus, while one of the speakers, a new voice, was beyond the computer, the words of the Tir came through clearly.

Listening carefully to the sometimes garbled translation, Rinteel thought, I must speak with the ruler of these people. Alone.

Kraus-Maffei-Wegmann Plant Munich, Germany, 27 December 2004

Karl Prael, a goateed, heavyset man of indeterminate years, closed the massive vault door against the ear-splitting and mind-numbing sounds of a tank factory on a frenzy of production. A country that had turned from producing a few hundred tanks a year to over one thousand per month could no longer worry about the niceties of noise-pollution-control measures. The workers in the plant, the much-expanded plant, put on protective ear muffs and soldiered on.

Outside of the plant, of course — this being Germany, Germany being Green, and many — though not all — of the Green leadership having sold out to the Darhel, there was a continuous noisy protest against the plant, the projects it housed, the war effort, the draft… the name-your-left-leaning cause.

The din inside the vault was little better.

Prael had come to the project team from a cutting-edge software company. His job was fairly easy, or straightforward at least: produce a software and hardware package to control a light-cruiser-sized tank mounting a single heavy-cruiser-sized gun. This he could do; had nearly done, as a matter of fact. But the rest of the team…

“A railgun! A railgun, I say. Nothing else will do. Nothing else will give us the range, the velocity, the rate of fire, the ammunition storage capability, the…”

Ah, Johannes Mueller is heard from again, thought Prael.

“Then give me a railgun,” demanded Henschel, pounding the desk in fury, and not for the first time. “Tell me how to build one. Tell me how to keep it from arcing and burning out. Tell me how to generate the power. And tell me how to do those things now!”

“Bah!” retorted Mueller. “All of those things can be fixed. Half the problem in engineering is merely defining the problem. And you just have.”

“Yes,” agreed Henschel. “but the other half is fixing it and for that there is no time.”

“We do not know there isn’t time,” insisted Mueller.

“And, my friend,” said Henschel, relenting, “we do not know that there is time, either.”

Mueller sighed in reluctant agreement. No, they didn’t know if there was going to be time.

“If you gentlemen are finished shouting at each other?” queried Prael.

Mueller turned his back on Henschel, throwing his hands in the air. “Yes, Karl?”

“I have some news; several pieces actually. The first is this,” and with that Prael began handing around copies of a small, stapled sheaf of paper. “The decision on specs has been made. This is it, and we are going to design it.”

An elderly gentlemen, bearded and face lined and seamed with years spent in the outdoors looked over the sheaf. “They’ve rejected the idea of powering every idler, have they?”

“Yes, Franz, they have. They have also…” and Prael gave a brief and irritated moment’s thought to the thousands of Greens protesting outside the plant, ”… they have also rejected powering the thing with a nuclear reactor.”

“What? That’s preposterous,” interjected Reinhard Schlüssel, the team’s drive train and power plant designer. “We can’t power this thing with anything less than nuclear. That or antimatter.”

“We can, we must, we will,” answered Mueller. “Natural gas. We can do this.”

“I see they have at least accepted the use of MBA” — molybdenum, boron, aluminum — “armor,” observed Stephan Breitenbach from where he sat by a paper-laden desk. That’s something.”

“Limited MBA, Stephan. The stuff is too expensive and too difficult to manufacture to do more than reinforce the basic metal.”

Breitenbach shrugged off Henschel’s comment. Something was better than nothing. And the weight saved did suggest that natural gas would be an acceptable fuel.

“There is one more bit of news, quite possibly bad,” observed Prael with an evil grin. “They are sending us an advisor. Well, two of them actually. One is a man, just back from the Planet Diess, an Oberst[12] Kiel. He’ll be along in a few weeks at most. The other is — ”

The vault door opened. In, stiffly and commandingly, stepped a tall, slender man, dressed in Bundeswehr gray under black leather, and sporting the insignia for a lieutenant general of Panzertruppen. But the officer seemed much too young to be…

“… Gentlemen, I am pleased to introduce to you Generalleutnant Walter Mühlenkampf, late of the Reichswehr, the Freikorps, la Armada de Espaňa, the Wehrmacht, and the Waffen SS. Now he slurps at the Bundeswehr trough. I see you found your own way, Herr General.”

Berlin, Germany, 28 December 2004

The Kanzler had not yet come. It seemed impossible that he should be lost in this, his city.

As much as an Indowy could fume, Rinteel fumed. A complete lunar cycle of this people’s time I have sought a private conversation with the ruler of these Germans. How many will die for that lack of time? How much more is the cause, are the causes, imperiled?

His human… guards? Yes, they were obviously guards. Even so they treated him with indifference. Strangely, this made the solid little, green furred, bat-faced form more comfortable, rather than less. Nothing on this world was better guaranteed to send an Indowy, even a brave one — and Rinteel was regarded among his people as preternaturally bold, into a panic as the sight of those bared carnivore fangs the locals used as a sign of pleasure.

Fortunately, the humans of the BND never smiled. Thus, the Indowy had only to deal with their single-mindedness, their barely suppressed innate violence. This was quite job enough.

In the presence of these barbarian carnivores, Rinteel could not even work out his frustrations with pacing. He could only wait patiently for the Chancellor to arrive.

Bad Tolz, Germany, 28 December 2004

In this out of the way Kaserne, home at different times to elite units ranging from German Schützstaffeln to American Special Forces, Hans Brasche looked skeptically over ranks of recently arrived, rabbit-frightened recruits shuffling forward in lines to be assigned to their quarters and their training units.

They look bigger and healthier than my generation did. But then I suppose they have eaten better than we did. No Depression for them, no lingering effects of the long British Blockade. The Wirtschaftwunder[13] did them well.

Yet their eyes seem watery, the complexions sallow. There is no toughness in them, no hardness. Too much fat. How are we to make bricks without straw?

Hans glanced away from his charges and looked around the Kaserne. The Americans kept the old home up well. It has not changed much, thought he. Not since I was here as a boy of twenty.

“Und so, you wish to become officers of the Waffen SS, do you?” demanded the harsh looking Oberscharfsführer of the stiffly standing ranks of Junkerschule[14] hopefuls.

I want nothing, thought Hans Brasche, carefully silent. Nothing except that my father not beat my mother for my failings that he attributes to her. He would have me here, not I. But for her sake, here I must be.

“To become worthy to lead the men of the SS,” continued the noncom, “you must become harder than Krupp’s steel, more pitiless than an iceberg, immovable like the mountains that surround us.” The NCO gestured grandly at the Bavarian Alps clutching at every side.

“There is no room in the SS for divided loyalties. So all among you who have not yet left the church stand forward.”

Hans, along with rather more than half his class, obediently stepped forward. From behind the Senior NCO marched forward a number of juniors — beefy men, every one of them.

Hans never saw the fist that laid him out.

That won’t work here, he thought, coming back to the present for a time. These kids hardly know of the concept of a God. Unless, perhaps, it resides between their girlfriends’ legs… or is to be seen on the television. They have no innocence… no naiveté. They have no symbols. They seem to have neither hope nor faith. Not in anything.

Bricks without straw.

Perhaps the general will have an answer. We have a few days yet.

Berlin, Germany, 28 December 2004

“I have the answers you have sought, Herr Bundeskanzler,” Rinteel said, simply.

Long, long had the Indowy waited. Long had he been forced to push away and conceal his terror at the near presence of so many vicious carnivores. When the chancellor had finally — in secret — arrived, the Indowy was filled with relief. Here, at least was one barbarian who did not completely tower over him. Though the white-haired “politician’s” smile was even more fearful than the blank stares of his guardians.

“What answers, Indowy Rinteel? What answers when I do not have even the questions?”

Rinteel forced his eyes to the chancellor’s face, no mean feat for one of his people. His face twisted into the mode, Honesty in Word and Deed, automatically, though he knew the human could not recognize or understand it.

“Then let me offer the questions, Herr Bundeskanzler. Why, when faced with an invasion nearly certain to exterminate your people, does your political opposition resist every attempt to improve your chances of survival? Why, when the Posleen will extinguish most of your world and pollute the rest with alien life forms, do those most concerned with maintaining the ecological purity of your world do all in their power to undermine your defenses? Why, when the coming enemy is so powerful, are even your military leaders — some of them — so slow to push the rearmament, so almost incredibly incompetent in its execution? Why do those most in love with the notion of state control of your economy, high taxes and centralized planning, resist using these very means to assist your people’s survival?”

The BND guards’ faces assumed a somber and even angry mien. To this the Indowy was immune. At least they are not baring those flesh-rending fangs.

“I have considered these things,” admitted the chancellor.

“Then consider these as answers,” said Rinteel, handing over a human-compatible computer disk. “And consider that you should trust no one. This disk contains less than all of the information. There is someone, perhaps close to you, whose words we could not decipher.”

“I understand,” said the chancellor, though in truth he did not, not fully.

“I hope you do,” Rinteel answered. “For, if you do not, you will have little time in which to do so.”

Kraus-Maffei-Wegmann Plant, Munich, Germany, 28 December 2004

“And how long will you be here with us, Herr General?”

Mühlenkampf answered, “A few days at most, this time. And I shall return from time to time. I am, of course, always available for consultation, should I be needed. I have been studying up on modern systems ever since I came out of rejuvenation.”

“Very good,” returned Prael. “And added to your vast combat experience, we expect to produce something quite remarkable. Would you like to meet the rest of the team?”

“By all means. Please introduce them. And show me the plans.”

“Plans first then, I think. And while I am at it I will introduce the team members responsible for each part.” Prael directed Mühlenkampf’s eyes to a table upon which stood a model of a tank.

“Nice appearance, anyway,” muttered the general noncommittally.

“Oh, it will be more than appearance, Herr General,” answered Prael. “This is going to be, by at least two orders of magnitude, the most powerful panzer ever to roll.”

“We will see what we will see,” commented Mühlenkampf. “Why this absurdly long gun?”

“Johann?”

Mueller stepped forward. “Because they wouldn’t listen to me about a railgun, Herr General.”

Prael snorted. Mueller never missed a chance.

“You must forgive me,” said Mühlenkampf, “but what is a railgun?”

“My pet project… and dream,” answered Mueller. “It’s a weapon that passes electricity along two bars. The electricity creates a magnetic field. The field catches, and then propels forward at great speed, a projectile.”

“This is possible?” queried the general, realizing instantly the potential of such a weapon.

“Possible,” admitted Henschel, introducing himself. “It is possible, General Mühlenkampf, but not possible just yet.”

Mueller shrugged. “In time. A year or so, maybe. Okay, maybe two,” he admitted, looking at Henschel’s scorning face. “In any case, Henschel here is right. It will not be ready quite in time. What you see, General Mühlenkampf, is a three hundred five millimeter gun, much lengthened over its one hundred twenty millimeter predecessor, and using an American-designed propellant system. Since I can’t have my railgun, I am reduced to designing the recoil system for this one. Also, since the specialties are somewhat similar, I oversee the design of the suspension with Herr Schlüssel here.”

“Reinhard Schlüssel,” introduced the bent-over, gnomelike veteran of the German Navy. “It is also my job to design the turret for the tank. Though Benjamin here has been of inestimable value.”

Mühlenkampf cocked his head. “Benjamin?”

“David Benjamin,” answered the only truly swarthy man in the room. “Of Tel Aviv,” he continued coldly, so as to keep a hostile note out of his voice. “I am here on loan from Israeli Military Industries. We intend to build a few of these ourselves, and to purchase several more.”

The time for apologies passed before they ever became fully due, thought Mühlenkampf. None I could make would make up for anything.

Instead he answered, merely, “Very good. I have been most impressed with the design for all four versions of your Merkava panzer. Sensible. Wise. I am pleased you are here, Herr Benjamin.”

The Israeli shrugged as if to say, It would please me more were you displeased to see me, SS man.

Filling the stony silence that followed, Prael said, “Indeed, you can see the ancestry of the tank in the Merkava.”

“Yes,” agreed Mühlenkampf, glad for any bridge over the impasse. “That pushed-back turret especially. How big is this thing?”

“The Tiger Drei,” answered Henschel, finally naming the project, “Is twelve meters wide, thirty-one meters long and weighs approximately seventeen hundred and fifty tons, fully combat loaded. It is very heavily armored.”

“Mein Gott!” exclaimed the general, the implications of the size of the scaled-down gun on the model finally sinking in. “What could possibly drive the need for such a monstrosity?”

“Come here, Herr General, and I shall show you the answer,” answered Henschel, unveiling several models of Posleen landing and attack craft.

Bad Tolz, 3 January 2005

The general also did have an answer; though the answer was not one designed to please his nominal political masters, or — most particularly — some elements of their support.

The new recruits had been herded, cattlelike, to stand in the freezing snow in the middle of the Kaserne. There they stood, shivering and miserable in thin uniforms, unmarked save for a small flag of black, red and gold sewn on each sleeve. Suddenly, as if on command… indeed on command… from around the perimeter of the parade field lit spotlights, climbing and meeting overhead to form an arch or, perhaps better said, a cone, composed of dozens, scores, of spears of light.

The startled recruits flinched, unmilitarily, but the rejuvenated SS cadre scattered loosely around them took no official notice. Then they heard music… and the singing…

Mühlenkampf, Brasche at his side, stood in warm black leathers under the same cone as the recruits though yet he remained apart from them by decades and even worlds. He suppressed a grin. Icy cold was his mien, as icy as the air.

Face still a mask, he asked of Brasche, “Do you know why, my Hansi, the skinheads never really got anywhere, politically, in Germany?”

Hans whispered back, “No, Herr Obergrüppenführer…”

“Lieutenant General, Hansi. Lieutenant General,” corrected Mühlenkampf, gently yet with a sardonic grin he made no effort to keep from his face. “Our masters do not like the old ways.”

“Zu befehl, Herr Generalleutnant,” answered Brasche, semiautomatically.

Mühlenkampf’s grin remained, becoming, if anything, more scornful still.

“The skinheads never got anywhere, Hansi,” continued the general, “because this is Germany and the assholes never learned to march in step…”

“… Marschiern im Geist, in unsern Reihen mit…”[15] sang the marching men, boots ringing on the ice and cobblestones. Even now the first veterans became visible to the neck-craning recruits as their serried ranks passed through the gates of the Kaserne. “Die strasse frei!…” The song was forbidden, of course. “Ganz Verboten.” But to men who had told Hitler and Himmler to go “fuck themselves” not once, but on countless occasions, what meant the strictures of a government weaker and in every way even more despised? “Die Fahne hoch! Die reihen fest geschlossen…”[16] began the song’s last, repeat, verse.

In the ranks of the old SS sang one Helmut Krueger. How good it was to Krueger, how very good, to once again feel the blood of youth coursing in his veins. How good to march with his old comrades, to sing the old songs. How good it was to be what Krueger had never thought himself to be any other than, an unrepentant, anti-Semitic, Nazi of the old school.

Krueger dreamed, daydreamed actually, of a broad-scale return of the old days. He imagined once more the cringing Jewish, Slavic and Gypsy whores opening their buttocks, legs and lips in fear of him. The power was an intoxicant. He saw, with half a mind’s eye, the cowards, suspended by their necks from lamp posts, kicking and gasping and choking out their last. Even the memory caused him to shiver slightly with delight. He heard the “Heils” coming from ten thousand throats and the sound was better than good. He remembered how grand he had felt at losing the self and joining such a godlike power. He saw the flaming towns and smiled. He heard the screams from the gas chambers and crematoria and shuddered with a nearly sexual joy.

Krueger was sure that after decades of exile he was at last coming home.

Missing his home, Dieter Schultz, aged eighteen, along with the other recruits, shuffled nervously in the cold snow. One would have thought that the boys would never have heard the songs, this being Germany, rules being rules. And, indeed, know the songs they did not. Yet they recognized them.

Dieter and the rest knew, absolutely knew, that that song, in particular, was against the law, against the rules. Soon the polizei would come and break up this had-to-be illegal gathering. Soon, minutes at most, these damned refugees-from-the-grave Nazis would all be arrested and shortly thereafter the reluctant recruits would be sent home to mama. They knew.

Mühlenkampf tapped his left boot toe unconsciously as the column of thousands of old-young veterans even now split to envelop the boys in their charge. The music and the song changed, the veterans singing in voices and tones designed to knock birds dead at a mile:

Mühlenkampf, suddenly conscious of the tapping boot, forced it to a stop. “Ah, I’ve always liked that one, I confess, Hansi. Why I remember…” yet the thought was lost, uncompleted.

With a ruffle of drums and a flourish of horns the song ended. Still, the marching feet beat out a tattoo on the icy pavement: crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch. Sparks were struck by hobnails grating on bare stone. The sparks clustered about the men’s feet, adding a surreal air to the proceedings.

Brasche stepped forward to the microphone. “Men of the SS Korps… halt.” The marching feet took one more step, then slammed to a simultaneous halt. “Links und rechts… Um.”[18] The enveloping pincers turned inward as though they were parts of a single, sentient, beast. “Generalleutnant Mühlenkampf sprache.”[19]

Hans Brasche stepped back from the microphone, sharply, as the black-leather-clad Mühlenkampf walked forward.

Mühlenkampf’s head twisted back and cocked proudly, arrogantly. “I speak first to my old comrades, who need no speeches. Well met, my friends, well met. We have shaken a world before, together. We shall shake several more worlds before we are done.”

The proud head looked down its straight, aristocratic nose at the new recruits. “I speak next to those who are here to join us. Filth! You are nothing and less than nothing. Unfit, weak, malingering, decadent… Refuse of a society turned to garbage. Spoiled rotten little huddlers at apron strings.

“You make me ill. You make your trainers, my cadre, ill. You are a disgrace to your species, a disgrace to your culture… a disgrace to our nation and traditions.”

Mühlenkampf’s face creased with the smallest of smiles. “And yet we, we old fighters, have another tradition. We are, to paraphrase an English poet, charms ‘for making riflemen from mud.’

“Regimental commanders, take charge of your regiments.”

On cue, the band struck up Beethoven’s “Yorkische Marsch.” The icy field rang with crisp commands. Units faced and wheeled. Even the new recruits, smarting under a brief and contemptuous tongue lashing, could not help but be forced into step by the march’s heavy, ponderous refrain. As a long and twisting snake, the column marched out from under the tent of light to enter the world of darkness.

As the last companies were disappearing into the dark, Brasche asked, “So you think this will work, Herr General?”

Mühlenkampf snorted as if the very thought struck him as ridiculous. “This speech? Some lights? A little insulting language? A little showmanship? Do I think these will work? Hansi, spare me. Nothing ‘works’ in that sense. The easy transformation, like the nonsensically — impossibly — successful spontaneous mass uprising, are bugaboos of the left, of the liberals and of the Reds and the Greens.

“Ah, but Hansi, they forget something, those Reds and Greens. Several things, really. Germany was no less decadent, divided and weak in the 1920s. I was there. I remember. Yet we shook the world in the ’40s. Why? Because transformations like that are as superficial and shallow as they are easy. Those boys down there are Germans, Hansi — lemmings, in other words.

“Lemmings, they are, Hansi. Germans: mindless herd animals, at best.” The brief and indulgent smile was replaced in turn by a feral grin. Mühlenkampf slapped Brasche heartily on the shoulder, adding, “But they’d rather be in a pack than a herd, my friend… a pack of wolves.”

Bad Tolz, Germany, 31 January 2005

Schultz is too clean, thought Krueger. In an exercise in mud crawling intended for little higher purpose than to accustom the boys to getting dirty — well, that and simple toughening to overcome their civilized sensibilities, the boy remained too clean.

Krueger bent over and picked up a clod of half-frozen mud. This he smeared into Schultz’s face snarling, “You little pussy. You smelly little fur-hole filled with nothing. You are nothing so good as a Jew-bitch camp whore. At least she would have known her job.”

Turning from Dieter to the rest of the platoon, standing in ranks, Krueger shouted, “The earth is your friend. Use it. Huddle up to it as if to your mother’s tit. Embrace it like the little sluts you used to waste your time with. Dig into it. Do not be like this ever-so-prissy little schoolboy, Schultz, afraid to get yourselves dirty. You can wash dirt away. Your own blood is a tougher stain. Dismissed.”

Without another glance Krueger turned away from his charges and walked to the NCO barracks, briskly and erect.

The platoon gathered about Schultz, standing there with his face dripping filth. No one said a word; they just stared. Schultz himself quivered with anger. By what right, by what right did this man who looked no older than did Dieter himself, treat him like dirt? And not merely today, but everyday, so it seemed to Schultz, Krueger — his platoon trainer, had some new heap of abuse for him.

One of the boys, Rudi Harz, put a calming hand on Dieter’s shoulder. “Mein freund, my friend… Krueger is an asshole, a Nazi asshole to boot. But he is also a Nazi asshole who knows. And he sees something useful in you. Bear with it.”

Around the two the others nodded somberly.

Schultz, grateful for the touch and the concern, cocked his head and shrugged, adding his own nod. Harz was a good comrade. So were they all.

“But that asshole, Krueger?” said Dieter, quietly. “He is a bad man, whatever he may know.”

“Yes,” agreed Harz. “He is the worst. If I hear even one more tale of his rapes in the old concentration camps I will vomit. Even so, use him for what he is good for: which may include how to keep ourselves alive.”

Silent, Schultz again nodded. Then to the rest he said, “Shall we march back then? Not crawl or amble? March back singing?”

Amid a general assent, and a wink from Harz in Schultz’s direction, the boys formed into four ranks. “You march us back, Dieter… that’s right, Dieter… show that bastard Krueger that he can’t break us up.”

Silently agreeing and taking a place on the left side of the platoon, Schultz gave the command, “Vorwaaaats… Marsch!”

Up in the front rank, Harz began the song, “Vorwärts! Vorwärts! Schmettern die hellen fanfaren…”[21]

At a distance, still walking away, Krueger smiled to himself and felt an enormous inner glee. He muttered, happily, “The old ways still work.”

Over the Rhein River, 13 February 2005

The steep banks of the river spoke to the Indowy with a voice hoary with age. He remembered; he remembered.

“We have been to your planet before, long, long ago,” Rinteel said, seemingly to the chancellor. “It is a story of sadness.”

“Really?” asked the chancellor. “Sad, how?”

“The same way all blighted hopes are sad,” answered the Indowy, distantly.

Off, too, in the distance, Rinteel saw a rocky hill. His mouth began to mime words in his own tongue. The chancellor had no clue what the words meant, yet something in the cadence touched a chord.

“What is that you are saying?” the chancellor asked.

The Indowy took a few moments, inexpressibly sad and weary moments, to answer. “It is a song of my people, an ancient song. It tells of an attempt at liberty from our oppressors, of an ancient stronghold, of trying to forge a weapon to defend those who might have become, in time, our deliverers.”

The Indowy sighed and pointed from the helicopter window. “It tells the blood-drenched tale of that rock over there.”

His interest piqued, the chancellor gave orders to the pilot, ignoring the scowls of his security detail. The helicopter veered sharply to the right. In the setting sun the rocky hill gleamed golden and beautiful.

The helicopter touched down flawlessly, despite the heavy crosswind atop the hill. The Indowy, seemingly in a trance, spirit walking, dismounted first. He was followed by the chancellor and his guards.

The helicopter had landed a scant three hundred meters from the summit. Over the steep and rocky ground the Indowy advanced, his chanting growing louder with each step. The Chancellor thought he could almost recognize some of the words: “Fafneen… Mineem… Albletoon… Anothungeen… Nibleen… Fostvol.”

At last the Indowy, and the others, stood before a sheer rock wall. “It was my clan, mine and mine alone, which made this attempt. We paid for it, heavily.”

“What attempt?” asked one of the BND guards.

Rinteel half ignored the question. Instead, speaking distantly, he said, “We wanted to make a holy order, a group of warrior heroes, to man the defenses we would build here. We had thought that under the protection of Anothungeen, an insuperable defense for your planet, your people might grow to mightiness. We could not defend you. Yet we sought to give you the means to defend yourselves.”

The humans of the group, swaying on the wind-swept slope, faced the unmarred cliff with boredom writ large upon their faces. And then the Indowy reached out a palm and uttered a phrase in a nonhuman tongue. A portion of the rock face disappeared, exposing a rough, archlike entrance. The humans, including the chancellor, gaped. Still in his half trance, Rinteel entered; in enclosed spaces the Indowy people were much less fearful than were the sons of Adam.

From just past the arch Rinteel said, “This place was chosen because it was on the fringe of your then dominant civilization. Here we could, so we thought, develop the systems, Anothungeen and Fafneen, in peace. From here also we could, so we thought, distribute it secretly throughout your then-dominant civilization, the one you humans call ‘Roman.’ ”

The Indowy’s chin sank upon his breast.

The chancellor looked over and past the Indowy to cast his gaze upon a scene of ancient slaughter. Skull-less cadavers, dried and brittle, of humans and Indowy both, met his sight. The chancellor’s mind turned back to little piles of gnawed bones in a place called “Fredericksburg.” “Mein Gott,” he said.

“Only one of us, Albletoon, escaped the slaughter,” Rinteel translated as he recited. “A human mercenary, traitor to his race, led the assault. Siegfried, cursed be his name, betrayed the People. For greed… and the promised mate… he sold them out… and so fell the cause of liberty. The traitor Mineem led them through, foiled the gate, and compromised the safeguards. For foul gold, and fame, our hero Siegfried sold his soul.”

So deep was the Indowy into his trance that the chancellor feared for him. He reached out a hand almost comradely.

Rinteel shrugged off the comforting grip.

“Let me make sure I understand,” the chancellor said. “Your people knew of us, and tried to save us, centuries ago?”

“More than centuries, millennia.”

“But you failed? It didn’t work?”

“No,” answered Rinteel, with a sigh both sad and painful. “We forgot — it had been so long since we had known war. Only weapons of your own forging could save you. The Elves will sabotage anything we might give you. So, no, Herr Kanzler, no, it won’t work. It didn’t work.”

Kraus-Maffei-Wegmann Plant, Munich, Germany, 15 February 2005

“Well, that didn’t work,” sighed Mueller.

“Back to the drawing board,” agreed Prael, disgust dripping with every syllable.

The object of that disgust, an enormous steel cylinder leaking heavy red hydraulic fluid as if from a ruptured heart, stood shattered within its testing cradle. The cylinder, intended to be one of ten that would absorb the recoil of the Tiger III’s twelve-inch gun, had proven deficient… and that in the most catastrophic way possible. Indeed, so catastrophic had the failure been that at least one of the testing crew within Prael’s vision was leaking red fluid nearly as rapidly as the cylinder. Instantaneous decapitation will do that.

Mueller, emerging from the test shelter, itself a metal bunker, looked at the body and shook his head wearily. “I did want a railgun. Continuous acceleration. Greater — much greater — ammunition storage…”

The Israeli, Benjamin, interrupting, asked of Prael, “At what point did the metal give way?”

Instead of answering directly, the German handed the Jew a printout.

“I see,” said Benjamin. “Hmmm. Could we reduce the charge… no, I guess not, not and achieve the kind of velocity we must have…” The Israeli had, in an earlier day, riding his Merkava against his national enemy, punched out more than one Arab-manned, Russian- or Ukrainian-built, tank.

“Nor can we reduce the weight of the projectile and still achieve the penetration we must have,” finished Mueller.

“GalTech,” offered Nielsen.

“The chancellor, acting on the advice of the BND, has decreed not,” answered Henschel. “For what it’s worth, I think he is most likely right in that. The Galactics have their own agenda. That agenda might or might not include the presence of humanity after the war.”

Scratching an ear absentmindedly, Benjamin observed, “When David went out to fight Goliath, King Saul offered the boy the use of Saul’s own armor and weapons. The boy refused, claiming that he would do better with his own weapon than with others the use and feel of which were unfamiliar to him. David was right. Your chancellor is right. Our prime minister agrees. This must be a human weapon, something the Galactics cannot interfere with.”

“Isn’t there some way we can strengthen the recoil cylinders by making them simply bigger?” asked Mueller, pushing his pet railgun to the side for the nonce.

“No,” said Prael, rubbing his face briskly with a frustrated hand. “We’ve looked into that. We can reduce the cylinders to eight and make them somewhat larger and stronger. And then the breech of the gun hits the back of the turret. Scheisse! We tried to cut it too fine.”

Though they had not been present for the test, the resounding crash from the destruction of the recoil cylinder had sent a shock wave through the entire plant, drawing Schlüssel and Breitenbach at a run. They entered the test chamber, took one look at the cylinder, another at the corpse, and crossed themselves like the good Catholics they were. Schlüssel, perhaps not so good a Catholic as Breitenbach, said, “Fuck!” immediately after.

What had happened was so obvious that neither Prael nor the others felt the need to explain to the two newcomers.

“Oh, well,” said Schlüssel. “There’s some good news. Breitenbach, here, has gotten something very interesting from the Americans. Tell them, Stephan.”

In his left hand Breitenbach carried a small black box, attached to and trailing a harness. “Better I should show them, nicht wahr, Reinhard?”

Schlüssel sighed, resignedly. Impetuous boy! “Oh, yes. By all means show them, since you must.”

Without another word, Breitenbach turned on his heel and left the area. When he reappeared some minutes later, standing on a steel walkway seventy feet above the factory floor, the harness was around his body. Schlüssel directed the others’ attention upward with a nonchalant finger.

With a boyish cry, and to the wide-eyed amazement of all of the others but Schlüssel, Breitenbach hurled himself over the railing guarding the walkway. He fell, faster and faster, shrieking with a boy’s mindless joy. So fast fell he that the eyes had difficulty following. Henschel’s eyes didn’t follow at all as he had closed them against the seemingly inevitable impact.

The impact never came. Eighteen to twenty feet above the plant floor, Breitenbach’s body began to slow. The rate of slowing continued to increase. By the time Breitenbach had reached the floor, he was able to settle onto his feet as gently as a falling feather.

“What the hell caused that?” demanded Mueller.

Schlüssel shrugged. “The mathematics are beyond me, frankly. Had she not written them down, the American girl who discovered the principle would likely have found them beyond herself as well. Long story there, so I am told.

“But look at it this way: that black plastic device on Stephan’s harness takes the energy of falling, saves it, and then twists it sideways to turn it into an energy of slowing. We believe we can use this in the suspension system for the tank — without a major redesign being required, by the way — and reduce the robustness of the shock absorbers to save perhaps fifteen or twenty tons of weight. To say nothing of reducing the maintenance required.”

Mueller’s eyes, which had never narrowed to normal after Breitenbach’s plunge, grew wider still. Prael’s eyes began to dance in his head, unable to focus on anyone or anything. Henschel and Benjamin exchanged thoughtful glances.

Heads swiveled slowly as all eyes turned to the ruin of the recoil cylinder. A new light gleamed in those eyes.

Paris, France, 15 February 2005

Isabelle’s husband entered her kitchen wordlessly, a paper clutched in one hand.

She did not see the paper, initially. She saw instead a much-loved face gone ashen.

“What is wrong?” she asked.

He didn’t answer, but just thrust the paper at her.

With a trembling hand she took the proffered form letter and read it through quickly. Uncomprehending, she shook her head in negation. “They can’t do this to you, to us. You did your time in the army as a boy. They have no right.”

The husband quoted from the scrap of paper he had already read fifty times, “In accordance with our time-honored heritage and traditions, all Frenchmen are permanently requisitioned for the defense of the Republic.”

“But you are a doctor, not a killer,” Isabelle objected.

“Killers get hurt,” answered the husband. “Then they need doctors. I report the day after tomorrow.”

She stood there for a long moment, stunned, unable to speak further.

Bad Tolz, Germany, 17 February 2005

Quietly, a long and snaking column of armed men marched up the forest trail in the dead of night. In the darkness, only the eyes gleamed, and occasionally the teeth. The faces were darkened by burnt cork and grease paint… and a fair amount of simple dirt. Frozen dirt and gravel below crunched softly under the soldiers’ boots.

The boys, as Brasche thought of them, had done well so far with their basic training. Marksmanship was of an acceptable order, though Brasche had serious reservations that any amount of normal training would be adequate to teach anyone to shoot well when there was an enemy shooting back. He had served on the Russian Front, after all.

But “well” is a relative term, he thought, too. And we have a few tricks, ourselves, that just may help. Brasche smiled with wicked anticipation at what awaited the boys ahead.

The boys’ ostensible mission was to counterattack to retake a section of field entrenchments lost to a notional Posleen attack. In fact, as Brasche and a few others running the exercise knew, the techniques of the counterattack through the trenches were purely secondary. The objective of the exercise was to frighten the boys half out of their wits so that once they recovered those wits would be harder to frighten.

Brasche heard static breaking over the radio at his side. He answered with his name.

“Oberst Kiel here, Brasche. My men are in position.”

“Excellent, Herr Oberst.” Brasche glanced quickly at the rear entrance to the trench system just as the first of the new troops began his descent into it. “The party should be beginning right about… now.”

As if they were timed to a clock, as indeed they were, the first mortar shells crashed down onto the objective area. Through the actinic glow of the splashing shells Brasche saw, faintly, the outlines of half a dozen or so of Kiel’s men. Themselves immune to any weapon the new boys had to bring to bear — as well as from the mortar shells, the armored mobile infantry were there to add spice, frightfulness really, to the exercise. Their holographic projectors were ideal for portraying a Posleen enemy, even a mass of them. But best of all…

“Liebe Gott im Himmel!” Brasche heard a boy — young Dieter Schultz, so he thought — exclaim over the radio. “They are fucking shooting at us. For real!”

“Indeed they are, Kinder.” Brasche recognized Krueger’s voice in the radio. “With weapons much like the ones the invaders will have. Now what have you been taught about what to do when someone is shooting at you?” asked Krueger, with a tone of scorn.

The radio went silent immediately. Still, so Brasche was pleased to note, rifle fire began to flash out from the trenches, to strike the holographic projections or even, occasionally the armored combat suits. Where a bullet was sensed to have passed or hit, or a shell or grenade to have exploded, an Artificial Intelligence Device — or AID, eliminated one or more of the Posleen targets. Meanwhile, from above the ground and the trenches, the Armored Combat Suits themselves flashed fire generally in the young boys’ direction. The ACS were aiming to frighten, however, rather than to kill or wound, carefully keeping their point of aim away from the boys’ heads and bodies.

Young Schultz’s voice again crackled over the radio to be answered by a regular Bundeswehr tank commander on loan to the training brigade for the exercise.

Over the sound of rifle fire, high explosives, and the sound barrier cracking of the ACS’s grav-guns, Brasche detected the throaty diesel roar of a Leopard II tank in full charge.

Good boy, young Schultz, thought Brasche. Not everyone would have remembered that they were not in the fight alone.

The tank was suddenly lit in Brasche’s view by its own flame as its main gun spewed forth a storm of flechettes onto the objective area…

Brasche and his wingman advanced alone into the storm of steel. Ahead, artillery pounded at such of the Russian positions as could be positively identified or confidently guessed at. There was never enough of it though.

They had been warned that the defenses were incredible. But nothing had prepared Brasche or the men who had begun the battle under his command for the reality of Kursk. Nothing short of a tour through hell could have even approached the reality.

Of the men under his command to begin, a single platoon of Panzer IVs and a platoon of infantry in support, all that remained were a brace of tanks. The infantry was but a memory.

And Ivan’s PAKs, his antitank guns, were everywhere. Brasche shuddered at the memory of a fight between his medium panzers and no less than a dozen Russian guns, dug in, camouflaged and firing under a unified command. That fight alone had cost him two panzers. The screams of one crew, burning alive, still rang in the tank commander’s ears.

In Brasche’s headphones he heard the commander of his wing tank exclaim, “Achtung! Achtung! Panzer Abwehr Kanonen zum—”[22] and the panicky voice cut off.

But the direction was not needed. Standing in the tank commander’s hatch, Brasche himself could see smoke and fire belching from the ground to his right. Eyes straining to make out the precise location of his enemy, he could not see, but he could feel, the half dozen solid shot that tore through the air at himself and his wing man.

Both tanks frantically tried to pivot themselves to place their more strongly armored glacis in the direction of the fire, as their turrets swung round even faster to engage the enemy.

A race against time it seemed. And then Brasche realized there must have been a reason for those guns to have opened fire when they did. He turned around just in time to see more fire coming from behind.

Then the world went black for Hans Brasche, Fifth SS Panzer Division (Wiking).

The Leopard fired again, clearing Hans’ reminiscences from his mind. Never mind, though. Back at Kursk, more than six decades prior, the second battery of guns had opened up, gutting both his tank and his wingman’s. Hans had lost consciousness. He never knew how it had come to pass that he escaped the tank. In his memory he imagined a mindless crawling thing, fleeing the fire like an animal fleeing a combusting forest. Of his trip back to Germany, to his convalescence, his memory had been reduced to a sense of little beyond pain, sometimes dim, sometimes agonizing.

The memory of the pain made him shudder, still.

Brasche pushed the memories aside, finally and completely. The open ramp into the trench system awaited. Hans walked forward and descended.

Down in the trenches Dieter Schultz, age eighteen, shuddered with pain from a tank-fired flechette that had grazed one arm, ripping an inch-long jagged tear across his skin. Blood poured out, staining his kampfanzug, his battledress. The blood showed a dullish red in the tracers’ gleam.

Beside Schultz another of the boys, Harz, looked down in uncomprehending fright. “Dieter, you’re bleeding.”

“Never mind that,” insisted Schultz, clamping a hand to his wound to stop the trickling blood. “Run down the trench to Third Squad. Get them to move to the right and engage… to take some of the fire off of us here.”

“Zu Befehl, Dieter,”[23] answered Harz, half mockingly and yet half serious.

Krueger, meanwhile, crouched silently nearby, watching Schultz’s actions with an eagle eye. He caught a bare glimpse of Brasche, easing himself down the trench, and stood to a head-bent attention.

“Herr Major?” asked Krueger.

“Nothing, Sergeant,” answered Brasche. “Just observing.”

Dieter, obsessed with his wound but more so with his mission, did not notice Brasche standing nearby. Still, Hans noted the quiet boy, growing into his potential, there in the cold and muddy trench.

The boy shouted to the others around him. “Stand by.” Then he spoke a few short words into the radio, “Five rounds, antipersonnel.” Brasche and Krueger ducked low once again. And only just in time, too, as the distant tank began firing rapidly, deluging the surface above with flechettes. All told there were precisely five major blasts and five minor as the flechette rounds burst to spill their deadly cargo.

Without more than half a second’s hesitation after that fifth minor explosion, Schultz shouted another command and the boys, following his example, stuck their heads and their rifles above the trench lip, adding their precision fire to the holograms and ACS remaining.

Very good, thought Brasche.

Paris, France, 17 February 2005

The house was plunged in an early morning sadness. The mother and one little son cried openly. The elder boy, nearing thirteen now, struggled to keep his face clear. Last night his father had made him promise to be the man of the house, a promise asked for solemnly… and as solemnly made.

“I will write every day, ma cherie… ma belle femme,” promised the husband, stroking the sobbing Isabelle’s hair softly. “And I should be able to take leave at sometime.”

Isabelle pressed her wet face into his shoulder. Her encircling arms held him tightly. There were no words she could bring herself to say.

Last night had been bad. They had fought as they rarely fought. She had struggled to get her husband to desert, to flee to some place past the army’s reach. He had steadfastly refused, claiming — truthfully insofar as he knew — that no place on Earth would be safe from the army, not now with the entire planet rearming to the teeth.

In the end, seeing that he would not, it had been she who had relented. In fear for her future and in remembrance of more youthful, happier times, she had dragged her husband to their large wooden bad and made love to him with a dazzling skill and enthusiasm that left him breathless.

“That is to remind you,” Isabelle had said, “to remind you of what you have here and to make you want to come back.”

Still half out of breath, he had answered, “After that awesome performance, my love… and at my age… I should be better to stay away in order to safeguard my life.”

Kraus-Maffei-Wegmann Plant, Munich, Germany, 21 June 2005

Mühlenkampf was… well, there was no other word: he was awed.

Gleaming above him, for the beast had not yet had its coat of paint, stood the Tiger III. Below, at ground level — though the ground was meters-thick concrete — the tracks were caked with the mud, so Mühlenkampf noted with interest.

“She works,” he announced with a quiver in his voice, drawing the correct conclusion from the caked mud.

Proudly, Mueller, Schlüssel, Prael and the others stood a bit taller. “She works, Herr General. This is prototype number one. There are a few bugs yet. But she moves. She shoots. She can take a punch on her great armored nose and punch right back.”

“And,” added Prael who had designed and nearly hand built her electronic suite, “Tiger III is the best human designed and built training vehicle in history, with virtual-reality simulators to allow a full gamut of gunner and driver training without ever leaving the Kaserne.”

“We will have to take her out anyway,” answered the general. “Otherwise you will never know what might still be wrong. When can I have one? Or, better still, many of them?”

“This one is yours now,” answered Mueller. “We are, indeed, hoping your field tests will help work out any remaining problems.”

But Mueller spoke to Mühlenkampf’s back. Already the veteran was fumbling with his new, inconvenient, and sometimes damnable cellular phone.

“Brasche? Get to Munich. Now!”

Sennelager, Germany, 28 June 2005

Basic training was long over now. The thin, emaciated skeleton of a Korps was beginning to grow and fill out here at this training base on the north German plain where the boys had been relocated for unit training.

Though Basic was over, the days were still as long and the nights sometimes longer. And yet the boys reveled in the name “soldier.” On the route marches that took them through the nearby towns the boys marched with pride and a spring in their steps.

That the girls turned out to watch, more often than not, didn’t hurt matters any.

Yet the nights and days remained long. Soldiers were killed in training and their places taken by new faces. The old German army had thought that one percent killed in basic training was not merely an acceptable, but a desirable figure. The new-old German Army did as well, this portion of it, at least.

That rarely happened in the regular Bundeswehr. There, the few Wehrmacht veterans scattered about were impotent to change things from the politically correct, multiculturally sensitive stew the politicians had made of the German army.

Only in the 47^th Panzer Korps, called by political friend and foe alike, “the SS Korps,” were there enough men who knew the old ways — knew them, and more importantly, were willing to tell the politicians and social theorists to “go fuck yourselves” over them — to meld their new charges into what Germany, what Europe, what humanity, needed.

And so the boys marched with pride and a spring, knowing that, perhaps alone among their people’s defenders they could and would do the job at hand.

Was it this that the girls of the towns had seen? Was it that they had seen one group of defenders whom they could be sure would never leave them defenseless until death stopped them?

The boys didn’t know.

“I just know I get laid a lot more than I used to,” laughed the irrepressible Harz, just before something attracted his attention.

It began as a low rumble in the air. Soon, the boys were hustling out of their tents in fear of an earthquake.

“What the fuck is it?” asked Harz of Schultz.

Dieter just shook his head, equally uncomprehending.

“Over there!” shouted another of the boys. “It’s a tank. Nothing much.”

Schultz looked and saw an iron beast cresting a hill. Yes, just another tank. Nothing special. They worked with tanks all the time. And then, as the tank drew closer and the rumbling stronger, his eyes made out a tiny something, projecting from the top of the turret.

“Liebe Gott im Himmel!”[24]

From atop the Tiger III, as if on parade… as if on parade before a universe he personally owned, Hans Brasche, late of 5^th SS Panzer Division (Wiking), tossed a crisp salute at his future tank crews.

Sennelager, Germany, 14 July 2005

The base had been chosen for the assembly of the 47^th Panzer Korps because of its central location. From all over Germany’s hundreds of small Kasernen, new, old and refurbished, poured in the thousands of newly trained troops and their veteran cadres.

Convenient for assembly of a large Korps as it might have been, the base was also too close to Hamburg, too close to Berlin, too close to Essen and Frankfurt for comfort. Another way of saying this was that it was altogether too comfortable and easy for the left of center of German politics, at least of that part which answered to those leaders of the left who had secretly sold out to the Elves, to find their way to the place.

And they did. In their thousands… in their tens of thousands.

“Must be fifty thousand of the bastards,” muttered Mühlenkampf, standing at his office window overlooking the main gate to the Kaserne. “Where the hell did they all come from? And why aren’t the boys out there in the army instead? Why aren’t the damned girls in the army, for that matter?”

He knew the answer, of course. Despite the threat of the Posleen, the idea of alternative service was too deeply ingrained in German political and social culture even for the threat of annihilation to overcome fully. Curiously, Great Britain and the United States, without a long or stable tradition of peacetime conscription or “compulsory social service,” had done better by far in dragging in their young people. There, the old age homes and the like had never become dependent on low-paid slave labor. Private always — or at least not fully governmental, they could remain so. In Germany? No such luck.

Wherever the protestors had come from, there was little doubt where they intended to go. Mühlenkampf watched without the slightest trace of amusement as the protestors, forming a human phalanx, made their first, barely repulsed, effort at storming the gate. He was even less amused to see a protest sign — “Friendship to our alien brothers,” said the sign — come smashing down across the head and shoulders of a policeman.

From the desk behind the general came the ringing of a telephone. He turned his eyes away from the protest to answer the nagging device. “Mühlenkampf,” he announced.

The chancellor’s voice came from the receiver. Though still unused to modern conveniences the sound seemed distant, and a bit muffled. A speakerphone, the general guessed, uncertainly.

“This is the chancellor. I have Günter sitting here with me in my office and listening. What is your situation, General?”

“My situation? I have forty or fifty thousand protestors outside my installation. Half of them are unwashed, long-haired young men who ought to be in the army and are not. They are storming the gates even as we speak. And the local police cannot hold them.”

There was a brief silence from the other end before the chancellor resumed. “I have two battalions of special riot control police en route to you by bus. They should be there in two hours at most.”

Unseen by the chancellor, Mühlenkampf shook his head. “That will be far too late. For that matter it would be far too little even if they were here now.”

“It is all I have, General.”

Absently, the old SS man said, “I have more. I have a half-strength armored Korps.”

A new voice spoke up, a voice tinged with rage. It was Günter’s, Mühlenkampf was quite certain, despite the distortion. “SS man, you may not use your Korps on those civilians; the public relations aspects would be disastrous.”

Holding in a snarl, the general decided to try a different tack. “Excuse me, Herr Kanzler. There seems to be some distortion in this connection. I can’t make out what you are saying. Did Günter say something? I will hang up and try again.”

Replacing the receiver, Mühlenkampf shouted out to his secretary, “Lucy, the Kanzler or perhaps some other flunkies are going to be calling here again in moments. Make all the lines busy, would you? And send someone to bring me my division and brigade commanders.”

Berlin, Germany, 14 June 2005

The Tir’s group of human underlings sat again in a semicircle before the desk. The Tir’s eyes were closed, though his ears were open. His breathing was shallow but steady. His lips moved in a mantra in his own tongue.

“All is in readiness,” said Dunkel, the Red. “Not less than fifty thousand protesters are converging on the base at Sennelager to combat the Fascists.”

“The army has no objections to this,” announced the one gray-uniformed human present, a representative of certain elements in the General Staff. “Even if some portions objected to the trashing of our own bases, virtually no one wants these hideous SS men to remain in uniform.”

Günter, the Green, sat silently for a while. “We have our people there as well, at least sixty percent of the protesters are Green.”

The Tir, eyes still closed and breathing still shallow, said in a strained voice, “You have all done well. There will be rewards for good performance…”

Sennelager, Germany, 14 June 2005

A helmeted Dieter Schulz, now rewarded for his talents by sporting the insignia of a Stabsunteroffizier — a staff sergeant — and Rudi Harz, a sergeant himself, formed their troops in ranks before taking their places to the right.

“What’s going on Dieter?” asked Harz.

“No clue, Rudi. Maybe we are going to celebrate Bastille Day.”

Harz snorted. “Somehow, I think not. Not with the orders being to wear helmets and gas masks, and to carry clubs.”

“Should we ask Krueger?” queried Schultz, in a whisper. “I hate asking that bastard anything.”

Krueger — now sergeant major of the headquarters detachment of Schwere Panzer Abteilung, heavy tank battalion, 501 — heard both his name and the word “bastard” whispered despite the distance between himself and the boys. He assumed that “bastard” could refer only to himself and smiled at the knowledge.

Standing in front of the detachment, Krueger turned his head over one shoulder and announced, “We’re going to bust some fucking heads, Knaben.[25] That is all you need to know.”

In front of the formation, thirteen blocks of twenty or twenty-one men — all that had been trained so far — plus a larger block to the left composing the service support detachment, the adjutant called the unit to attention. The men stiffened.

Brasche strode out. He, like the boys, was dressed in field gray. The more modern camouflage pattern, not one whit more effective against Posleen visual rods, was in short supply. It mattered little, in any case. Brasche and the rest of the Korps’ cadre were more comfortable in field gray than they ever would have been in the kaleidoscope of color that was more modern German battle dress.

There was an exchange of salutes. The adjutant moved to one side and marched to a position behind Brasche.

Hans was short, curt even, in his speech. The duty ahead promised to be unpleasant and, while he would perform that duty, he had little genuine enthusiasm. “Boys, there are some people outside the main gate trying to break in and trash our little home away from home. On my command, you will don your protective masks. This is so that the newspapers and television and, incidentally, the legal system cannot identify you by face. Then we will march singing — singing the “Panzerlied” — to the main gate. If they go away when we do this, so much the better.

“But if they do not, we are going to put them, as many of them as possible, into the hospital.”

Schultz distinctly heard Krueger chortle with unrepressed glee. He thought, but could not be quite sure, that he heard a whispered, “Just like the good old days.”

Brasche bellowed a command which was echoed down the ranks. The men fumbled with gas masks. These now — since the Posleen war — had gone largely obsolete, the Posleen being quite immune to any terrestrial war gas. Indeed, the only reason the men had even been issued and trained on masks was that the German chemical industry, working in close cooperation with the Russians, believed that a militarily useful toxin might someday be developed from the venom of the grat, a wasplike pest of the Posleen.

At another command the men ported their makeshift clubs. Still another and the battalion faced to the right. A last command and they began to march down the cobblestones towards the main gate to the Kaserne.

No command was required to begin the singing.

Though muffled by the masks, the sound of tens of thousands of throats belting out the German Army’s — be it called Reichswehr, Wehrmacht, SS or Bundeswehr — traditional song for its armored forces made the woods and the stones of the barracks ring.

So deeply involved were they in the process of trying to force the Kaserne’s gate that the foremost ranks of the rioters scarcely noticed the approach of the Korps. Indeed, the sounds of smashing signs and grunting, struggling men and women quite drowned out the marching song for those nearest to the struggle. Not one of those rioters saw any incongruity in the fact that the signs bore slogans such as “Peace Now” and “Don’t Grease the Wheels of the War Machine.” Not one marcher found anything amiss in the attempt to sabotage the training of men who would save the Earth, if they could, from the Posleen who would destroy it. The protesters simply refused to acknowledge that the Posleen were any threat. Many of them refused even to acknowledge that the aliens existed.

Back a distance, watching the struggle but taking no part in it, sat a reasonably well doped-up Andreas Schüler. Tall, thin, not too recently washed, Schüler wasn’t here because he cared about “saving” the Earth. He wasn’t here because he really objected to the army, except that in his own very personal way he had once objected to finding himself in the army and had instead done his “social year” in an infinitely more comfortable nursing home.

Andreas had no great objection even to the 47^th Panzer Korps. He, frankly, didn’t care that that Korps was in everything but name a resurrection of the dreaded SS. Indeed, in his younger days he had once flirted with the skinheads, though he had found no satisfaction in the movement.

Schüler had come — as he had come every time the German left had massed to break and demoralize another part of the army — for the dope, the girls, and the visual spectacle. He was by no means alone in this.

The spectacle had amused for a while, but then it had paled. Everything pales, in time. He recalled laughing as he watched a few protestors paint bright silver Sigrunen, SS, on the window of a Bundeswehr recruiting station. The marching crowd had laughed with him.

Even so, Schüler could not feel a part of the amorphous mass of humanity in whose march from the train station he had taken part. There had been singing on that march… but the singing failed to move him.

Despite the struggle at the gate, Schüler, like hundreds of others nearby, found himself more involved in conversation with the opposite sex than in any apparent cause.

But then he heard. And then, from his high perch, he saw.

From all corners of the Kaserne poured in gray-clad men at a steady, even a stately, pace. The boots resounded on the pavement, audible at hundreds of meters. Noncoms kept order, automatically interweaving the columns while still keeping units and ranks largely together. It was a spectacle not seen in Germany in many years.

The marching men sang:

At the point of the column, the tip of the spear, Brasche marched followed by Krueger — personally, then the 501^st Heavy Tank Battalion’s headquarters, and the rest of the battalion. Behind the battalion came the first elements of the foundation of Wiking Division, followed themselves by Hohenstauffen, Frundsberg, and the rest.

Mühlenkampf still remained at his office, though he had gone outside to stand on a stone porch to review the passing ranks. The command, “Augen… Rechts” — Eyes, Right — rang out as each company passed its Korps commander.

Dieter’s eyes snapped back to the front on command. Up ahead, past the Nazi — Krueger — he saw Brasche walking erect and, seemingly, proud. Unlike his followers, Brasche strode unarmed; his fists would do well enough. From the subtle twisting of his commander’s mask, Dieter was certain Brasche was singing along with the rest. Past the battalion commander the last of the local police could be seen, falling, bloody and bruised, under the smashing signs of the pacifists, and — less incongruously — of the Reds and Greens.

Schüler stood, mesmerized, while watching the very first man leading the field-gray-clad mass of troops smash into the protestors. That man had marched alone and out front. Though that soldier went down fairly quickly — a matter of less than a minute, the boy could not help but be impressed by the sheer ferocity with which he had fought.

More than the courage of that first soldier — Oberstleutnant Brasche, though the boy didn’t know that, Schüler was amazed — or perhaps better said, shocked — at the reaction of the men following.

Krueger didn’t like Brasche, not one bit. To the old Nazi, his commander seemed ambivalent, perhaps even weak. It was not anything Brasche had said, actually. Rather, Krueger had sensed an undertone of deep disapproval whenever he had regaled the new boys with tales of the old days.

But, affection or not, when Krueger saw his commander fall to the ground beneath the flailing fists and lashing feet of the long-haired rabble at the gate, he saw not a weak or even a non-Nazi. He saw a comrade in danger. Krueger raised his club overhead, turned over a shoulder and shouted:

“At ’em, boys!”

Muscle and bone augmented by the same process that had returned the octogenarian Brasche to full youth, Hans’ fists leapt and flew like twin lightning bolts. Wading into the crowd, he strode over a medley of bleeding, tooth-spitting, choking, bruised and gagging leftists. Behind him, the singing grew louder and closer.

He hoped it would grow very loud, very close… and very soon.

A woman, tall even by German standards, stood before him, defiantly. Defiantly, too, the woman lifted her chin and tore open her shirt, baring her breasts and daring the colonel to shame himself by striking a woman. Brasche drew back a fist to strike… and stopped. He couldn’t do it.

Sadly for him, neither that woman, nor the shorter one who threw her arms about his legs, felt the same sort of restraint. Legs fouled, Brasche lost his balance and fell. He neither saw nor felt the booted foot that connected with his skull, sending him, briefly, out of this vale of tears and into another.

The wind was from the west, carrying with it a stench that Leutnant Brasche at first could not identify. The young officer walked gingerly, even after a long hospital convalescence. The burn scars on his legs were still stiff and tender, cracking and opening on the slightest pretext to ooze a clearish crud. His concussion, also, continued to plague him with nausea and fuzzy mindedness.

The sign at the train station had said “Birkenau.” The name meant little to Hans, except insofar as it might mean a break from the endless horrors and deprivations of the Russian Front. Even those men he had spoken to at the front had had little comment other than that this camp, along with the others, were places where badly wounded SS men might have a few months or weeks of peace serving as guards before being fed back into the cauldron.

To the southeast of the station platform Hans saw a camp that seemed, somehow, and even at a distance, a little neater, a little daintier perhaps.

“What is that?” he asked of the SS man who met him on the platform, likewise a comrade sent — though earlier — for a healing break.

“The women’s camp,” that man answered. “There is another one much like it just past. Decent places to get laid if you can afford the price of a bar of soap, a toothbrush, or a scrap of food. Or you can just order them to perform… so I am told.”

“Who are we holding there?”

The other man shrugged, “Jews mostly. Also Poles and Gypsies. Some others. All enemies of the Reich… so they say. In any case, come along Leutnant Brasche. I’ll introduce you to the commander, Höss.”

Silently the two walked north to the comfortable SS barracks, Hans’ meager baggage ported by an impossibly slender, shaven-headed Jew. The stench grew worse, much worse, as they drew nearer the SS compound.

Hans still could not identify the smell. And then he felt a cold shiver run up his spine. It smelled like his tank… after he had been blown clear. In a brief moment of relative lucidity before he was evacuated he had smelled something much like that, albeit heavier in diesel fumes.

“What is that?” he asked. “That godawful stench?”

“Jews, Leutnant Brasche,” his newfound comrade and guide answered, ignoring, as did most SS, the arcane system of ranks inherited from the Stürm Abteilung. “Jews. We round them up. We starve them. We work them half to death. We gas them and then we cremate the bodies just west of here.”

“Mein Gott!”

“There is no God, here, Brasche,” said the other man. “And being here makes me think there is no God anywhere.”

Hans grew desperately silent then, remaining that way until he was ushered into the presence of his new, temporary, commander. Hans knew little of Höss. That little, however, included that the commander was, despite current duties, a highly decorated hero of the Great War, a veteran of the Freikorps and, at heart, a combat soldier. This knowledge informed Brasche’s actions.

Standing at the front of Höss’ desk, Hans thrust out a stiff-armed salute, “Heil Hitler, Leut’… Oberstürmführer Hans Brasche reports.”

Höss ignored the slip, his eyes taking in the new Iron Cross, 1^st Class, glittering at Brasche’s throat. “We can certainly use you, Brasche. I am short officers and — ”

Hans interrupted. Desperation to see and learn no more than he already had lent him boldness. “Sir, the front needs me more. I am healed enough. I wish to be returned to my old unit, the Wiking Division, to serve our Fatherland and Führer there.”

Höss regarded Brasche closely. No, there was no hint on the boy’s stiff face of anything but a profound sense of duty. The commander nodded. “Very well, Brasche. I understand the call of the front completely. It will take a day or two to prepare the orders. But I will send you back to your division. Good lad. You’re a credit to the SS.”

Dieter Schultz was no fanatic. No more so was his friend Harz. But when they saw their commander fall to a treacherous, underhanded attack, even the hated and despised Krueger became not too vile a man to follow into the fray.

The boys waded in, an unstoppable mass of swinging clubs, smashing fists, and stomping boots. Those who fell before them were given no quarter, but kicked senseless, in some cases to death. Singing among the first groups stopped to be replaced quickly by sobbing, shrieking and begging Reds and Greens.

“No mercy, boys!” shouted Krueger, exultantly if unnecessarily. “Break their bones!”

“Mein Gott,” exclaimed a wide-eyed Schüler at the scene of carnage spreading before him. Already the disordered mass of protesters was fleeing in panic. Already the soldiers were reforming to pursue, while formations to the rear helped their own battered comrades to aid while taking time to further kick and pound the fallen protesters.

A young woman — trampled by the panicking crowd — staggered by, her face half covered in a sheet of blood. Schüler approached to lend what aid he could. As he did so he heard the girl mutter, over and over, “This is impossible. Unbelievable. Impossible.”

He draped her arm over his shoulder and began half carrying her to the presumed safety of the nearby town of Paderborn. Still the girl continued to repeat, “Impossible.”

Although willing, and more than willing, to help, at length Schüler grew weary of the refrain.

“What is your name, Fräulein?” he asked.

She paused, as if trying to remember, before answering, “Liesel. Liesel Koehler.”

“What is ‘unbelievable,’ ‘impossible’ about this?”

Her arm still draped over his shoulder, Liesel stopped, bringing them both to a halt. She seemed to struggle for the words and concepts.

At length, when he had forced her back to movement to escape the rampaging soldiers, she continued. “It is impossible for people to act like those men did. They just can’t have. It is impossible that our good intentions did not prevail here today. It is impossible that we are about to be invaded. What intelligent species could possibly act the way they say these ‘Posleen’ do? The universe simply cannot be set up that way. It is impossible.”

Schüler said nothing. Yet he thought, “Impossible,” you say… and still the soldiers acted as they did. Impossible for good intentions to be for naught. And yet they were. Why then is it impossible for these aliens to act as we are told they will? Because you insist on denying it? Is it that you cannot see the world or the universe as it is? How much else are you wrong about, Liesel, you and all your sort?

Dieter Schultz and Rudi Harz, leading their men to and through the town, came upon a young man, half carrying a young woman. Their instincts and orders, heightened by the days events, were to crush these two. Yet they seemed harmless, the man burdened and the woman bloody.

“What happened to you two?” asked a suspicious Harz.

The young man held up one open-palmed hand in a sign of peace. “She was trampled by a panicked crowd,” he lied.

Harz and Schultz exchanged glances and lowered their clubs. Harz said, “It is not safe for you two here. You should go.”

Schüler nodded but then asked, “Where is the nearest recruiting station? And what unit is this?”

Schultz considered briefly and then gave directions. He answered, simply, “Forty-seventh Panzer Korps. Why?”

Schüler answered, “Because I think I have been wrong about some important things. ‘Impossibly’ wrong.”

Neither Harz nor Schultz queried any deeper. Schüler continued on his way, carrying Liesel. He deposited her at the first medical aid station he came upon. Then he continued on.

In a few minutes he had come to the Bundeswehr recruiting station for the town of Paderborn. The window was cracked, not smashed. Over the cracked glass, silver paint dripped from a crude set of twin lightning bolts. A sergeant stood inside, bearing a club.

“My name is Andreas Schüler. I wish to join the 47^th Panzer Korps.”

Sennelager, Germany, 21 July 2005

Mühlenkampf sat alone behind a massive desk dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, his division and brigade commanders standing before him. To their rear, at the conference room’s double-wide entrance, likewise stood two sets of complete, but unmatched, armor from the mid-fifteenth century. The walls were hung with battle flags going back to the late eighteenth century. On the floor and lining the walls rested standards, eagles atop wreaths atop hanging red, white and black, gold-fringed, banners.

The banners were newly made. Each bore double lightning flashes. Within each eagle-bearing wreath was some other unique symbol, a curved sun wheel here, there a key with a lightning bolt through it, here a clenched and mailed fist. One standard bore a stylized letter H; another a stylized letter F.

No unvetted civilians were ever permitted to see the banners.

“Frundsberg?” began Mühlenkampf, conversationally, naming the division rather than its commander, Generalmajor von Ribbentrop. Mühlenkampf considered Ribbontrop an absolute weenie, a posturer, a knave and a fool.[28] Only the man’s seniority as an SS officer, and his modern political connections, had seen him in command of a division. “Frundsberg, why do you suppose that we were allowed to be assaulted here in our camp? Why were riot police not available in sufficient strength to counter such an obvious and massive move?”

The questions were rhetorical. Mühlenkampf didn’t wait for an answer. “Hohenstauffen, what is wrong with our country? Jugend, why has every Korps in the armed forces except for ours been sabotaged? G von B, why are so many young men exempted from the call to duty? Wiking, why have some elements of the government attempted to sabotage both us and the Kriegseconomie?”[29]

Finally resting his eyes on the only battalion commander present, Mühlenkampf asked, “What is the problem here, Hansi?”

“I do not know, Herr Generalleutnant,” admitted Brasche.

“I know,” said Ribbentrop, confidently. “It is the Jews.”

Mühlenkampf snorted his derision. “Nonsense, Ribbentrop, you pansy. There aren’t enough Jews in Germany anymore to make a corporal’s guard. They are the least influential group we have. I wish we had some more. The Israelis at least can fight.”

Shaking his head, Mühlenkampf continued, “Forget the Jews, gentlemen. Our problems are home grown. The chancellor is… all right… I think. But beneath him? A Christmas cabal of red and green and some other color I cannot quite make out at this distance. It might be black as deepest midnight, as black as the outer reaches of space.”

Mühlenkampf stood and took a thin sheaf of papers, copies actually, from his desktop. These he began to pass out while still speaking. “We are rapidly coming to the end of our most intense training period. From now on we might relax, if only a little. I think, even, that some of the men might benefit from a period of leave. I want you to start granting leaves to deserving men, up to fifteen percent of the force at any given time.

“Those papers contain the names of those I most strongly suspect of being our foes. You might let the men see those names before they sign out of the camp,” finished the commander, returning to his seat.

Berlin, Germany, 15 September 2005

Though the Darhel lord did not require it, Günter stood stiffly erect before the massive desk behind which the lord sat. Günter was, after all, a German.

The lord’s face was impassive. His eyes wandered, looking everywhere but at the bureaucrat’s own face. Words, heavily tinged with the sussurant lisp caused by the alien’s sharklike teeth, were spoken as if to a party not present.

“This heavy fighting vehicle project has not been stopped,” observed the Darhel. “The rejuvenation of the German people’s fiercest warriors has been allowed. Sabotage of their fighting body has not been completed to standard. My superiors will require explanations of me. I have no sufficient explanation of this failure on the part of my underlings.”

Though the office was cool almost to the point of unpleasantness, still Günter’s face bore the sheen of a cold sweat.

An annoyed and frustrated tone crept past the Darhel’s lisp. “Explanations will be required.”

“My lord,” stammered Günter, “these SS simply will not listen or obey. We order them to do or not do certain things and they ignore us. Political leaders who see things in the proper way, as I do, are run out of their camps barely ahead of gangs of uniformed thugs.”

“Pay might be withheld,” conjectured the Darhel, distantly, eyes closing and a slight shudder wracking his small body. “Food rations withdrawn. Punishment inflicted. Bribes made.”

“All have been tried, my lord. Nothing has worked. And no less than eleven of our supporters in the Bundestag have disappeared under suspicious circumstances, two or three after each effort. Few right-minded politicians seem to have the courage to act in the face of this threat.”

“But, in any case, my lord, can’t your superiors understand the great good that has been achieved? Of thirteen panzer Korps, fully a dozen have had their training sabotaged through propaganda, insistence on the rights of junior soldiers, withholding of vital supplies and equipment, and rigorous application of environmental regulations. Moreover, this grand tank project has had its armor limited. Nuclear propulsion and armament have been refused. Surely these things weigh heavily against such minor failures.”

“Perhaps,” agreed the Darhel, reluctantly. “And yet we have seen and must remember how often your people have managed to avoid their inevitable position within Galactic civilization by slipping through even smaller cracks.”