Watch on the Rhine

They came into normal space spitting fire and death. They were met in the cold, hard vacuum by Task Fleet 4.2, Supermonitor Lexington and her American crew in the van. The Lexington hurled back death with defiance. Likewise with nuclear weapons, antimatter, kinetic energy projectiles, and high-energy plasma.

It was all for naught. Though Posleen died by the millions, the Lexington — the “Lady Lex” — and her escorts held the line for scant days before succumbing to the masses of fanatically driven Posleen.

Soon space around Titan Base became a battlefield, the battle lending yet more scrap metal and scorched and frozen flesh to space. That battle, too, was lost. The seemingly endless fleet of Posleen pressed on to ravage and raze an Earth that trembled at their approach.

Wäller Kaserne, Westerburg, Germany, 26 March 2007

An unshaven, yet unshaken, Mühlenkampf growled darkly at the images presented on his screen, “They’re coming right through. The Amis couldn’t stop them; could hardly even slow them. Neither could the base.”

And aide standing nearby answered, brightly, “We will stop them, Herr Generalleutnant.”

“Of course we will, Rolf,” he told the aide, with more confidence than he truly felt. The projected numbers were daunting. “Sound the recall. Code ‘Gericht.’[30] All troops to assemble at their battle positions and assembly areas.”

Giessen, Germany, 26 March 2007

Her name meant “battler” or “battle maiden.” Yet if ever a girl was misnamed, thought Dieter, that girl was Gudrun. Tall and slender, from golden hair to ivory skin to long and shapely legs, Gudrun evoked no image of battle. Gracefully she walked, as a woman, though Dieter suspected she was rather young, sixteen at most.

Schultz had seen her, once before, here at the soldiers’ recreation center that served the troops in and around the city of Giessen. He had seen her, the once, and he had come back every chance he had from then to now in the hopes of seeing her again.

And now — had God above smiled upon him? — the girl actually sat at the table nearest to his. Close up Dieter found her even lovelier than he had at a distance; this despite a fairly obvious attempt at portraying a sophistication the girl probably lacked. She pulled a cigarette out, and held it, nonchalantly, awaiting someone to light it.

“Give me your lighter, Rudi,” demanded Schultz of Harz. “Now, please. You know I do not smoke.”

With a smile that could only be described as sympathetic, if amusedly so, Rudi passed the tiny machine over. Dieter was at Gudrun’s side in the next instant, flame springing from his hand.

The girl smiled warmly and thanked Dieter who, taking it for encouragement, promptly sat beside her, introducing himself.

“Ah, my name is Gudrun.”

“I am very pleased to meet you, Gudrun. Very.”

The girl didn’t ask if he was in the army; such was obvious from the field gray Dieter wore. She did ask of his unit and job.

“I am the gunner for a Tiger III in the 501^st Heavy Panzer Battalion, 47^th Panzer Korps,” he answered.

Gudrun recoiled momentarily. “The SS Korps? The Nazis?”

Laughing, Dieter answered, “We’re not an SS Korps, Gudrun. Why, according to my chief, Sergeant Major Krueger, we are not fit to wipe the boots of real SS men. They did train us,” he admitted.

“Then you are not a Nazi?”

“Me?” Dieter laughed again, louder. “No, Liebchen.[31] I was a student when they drafted me and gave me a choice. Sort of a choice. Not much of one, as a matter of fact.” He shrugged. “And my grandfather told me I would be better off training under the old SS than under the new Bundeswehr. So there I went.

“And you?”

“I am in school still, learning to be a tailor,” she answered. As she did the music in the hall changed to something slow.

“Would you care to dance, Gudrun the tailor?”

Brasche had let all but a skeleton crew go to the dance. Krueger was here in the Tiger III, christened, if that was the right word, “Anna.” Likewise was the new boy, Schüler, who had just been assigned. A couple of others manned the auxiliary MauserWerke twenty-five millimeter cannon stations by remote from the armored battle center deep inside the tank. The loader, whose job actually involved running the elevators and automatic rammers that brought the three-hundred-five-millimeter projectiles and their propellant to the main gun’s breech and fed them to it, stood by.

The other sixteen men of the Anna’s crew, including Schultz and Harz, were in Giessen trying for a last chance at love before entering the coming fray.

But Brasche had had no interest, this despite having the body of a twenty-year-old again. He had met one girl in his life who had meant anything to him. And that girl was lost to him forever; all but an image in a photo, a clip of hair, and other images and feelings indelibly engraved on his heart and mind.

That girl, the original Anna — once of flesh and blood, smiled out at him from a photo held lightly in Hans’ hand.

Gudrun was light and graceful in Dieter’s arms as they danced. The boy himself was no dancer. And yet, at its best, dance, like the act of love, brings souls together in union and harmony. So it was with this couple, bodily movements meshing into unity of bodies. By the time the dance ended, Dieter knew he had found the one right girl for him. They simply fit. Perfectly.

The soft sweet smell of her perfume lingered in Dieter’s brain, doing its intended job of short-circuiting that brain. The two walked backed to Gudrun’s table, arms about each others’ waists, leaning against each other.

At the table they talked. And both knew that the talk was serious. There was little time for the boy-girl games so beloved of the romances.

“I want you, Gudrun,” Dieter announced simply. “Now. Here or nearby. Anywhere, really. But now.”

The girl looked forlorn. Her face shone with desire at least equal to his own. Still, reluctantly, she shook her head No.

“I have a boyfriend, Dieter. With the 33^rd Korps, 165^th Infantry Division. It wouldn’t be right… not until I can tell him about you… about us.”

Schultz understood and said so. “But after you have spoken or written?”

“Then, yes. You and I,” she agreed.

He nodded his head in agreement, “Yes. You and I.”

At that instant there came a commotion from the entrance way. Dieter saw Harz threading his way through the thickening crowd.

“It’s on, Dieter,” announced Harz. “’Gericht.’ Sie kommen.” They’re coming.

From his elevated perch high atop Anna’s turret Brasche saw the lightning streaks slashing down and up — Posleen spacecraft softening the defenses and human Planetary Defense Centers snarling their defiance. Regretfully, reluctantly, he replaced the other Anna in the small folder he had carried by his heart for nearly sixty years.

“Anna, down,” he commanded and the Tiger’s voice-recognition software sent a command to move the tiny elevator platform on which he stood down into the heavily armored command center of the tank.

Krueger was there with the skeleton crew. As often was the case, the sergeant major was regaling the boys with tales from the last war. So far as that went, Brasche could not and did not object. Sometimes, though, Krueger told of other things, vile things. This Brasche loathed, as indeed he loathed the man.

“It was great, I tell you, boys. Great. Your pick of the women in those camps. And some of them were lookers, too, even if they were just Jew bitches.”

“How did you end up in one of the camps?” asked Schüler. “I thought you were a combat soldier.”

“Well, I was only there for about six months, you see. While I was healing up from being shot by the Russians. At Ravensbrück, it was. A women’s camp. There were so many we never even asked their names.”

That was enough, more than enough, for Brasche. “Sergeant Major, that will be all. Men: to your posts. The enemy is coming. We move to meet them as soon as the rest of the crew returns.”

The crew began to scramble to battle stations. Instinctively, Hans’ hand moved to caress the left pocket of his tanker’s coveralls, his “Panzerkompli,” and the small folder it contained. He kept his face carefully neutral.

Harz looked away, neutrally, as Dieter and Gudrun said their last goodbyes, whispered endearments and hopes for a future. “The bus is here to take us back now, Dieter. I am sorry; we must go.”

Reluctantly, Schultz disengaged himself from Gudrun’s arms. Her hands were the last things he let go of. Even then, he could not help but lift one hand to his lips and press them against it.

“I will come back,” he said. “I promise.”

Gudrun immediately dissolved into tears. In a wavering voice she answered, through her tears, “I will be waiting. I, too, promise.” The girl’s head hung in unfeigned despair. “I promise.” Through her mind raced the thoughts that this would be the only chance, that Dieter could not wait for her to break things off with the other boy.

But there was no time. The recall was sounded. Action called. The bus awaited.

“Write to me,” she cried. “Please write,” and she hurriedly jotted an e-mail address down on a napkin.

Dieter, his heart at once overjoyed and breaking, nodded, took the napkin, released her hand, and turned to go. Already, outside the recreation center, a bus awaited. Inside the bus the troopers sang:

From his command chair, Brasche looked over his crew with satisfaction. There was no scuffling or confusion as men took their seats and strapped themselves in. Only young Schultz, his main gunner, seemed distracted.

“What is it, Dieter?”

“Nothing, Herr Oberst,” the boy answered.

Brasche raised a quizzical eyebrow. “The boy’s fallen in love,” answered the ever-helpful Harz. “Nice girl, too, if looks do not deceive.” Harz’ hands made curvy motions in the air, exaggerating a bit Gudrun’s willowy figure.

Schultz flashed his friend an angry look. Brasche merely smiled. “Rejoice then, Unteroffizier Schultz. Now you know, perhaps, what is worth fighting for.”

Brasche consulted the map display affixed to the left-hand arm of his command chair. On the display he traced the route he wished his battalion to follow with a finger. He pressed a button to send the route to each of the other twelve Tiger IIIs in his battalion. Then he keyed a throat mike. “Achtung, Panzer. Aufrollen.”[33]

They descended in waves of waves, tens of thousands of Posleen landing craft. Far out in space they split into three large task forces, one large group for Europe and North Africa, and one smaller one each for India and South America — those places already being largely taken over by the Posleen who had come before. The Latins and Hindus had really never been in any position to defend themselves.

The invader touched down first on the North African littoral. Along the Nile, and in its delta, Egyptians — Moslem and Christian alike, prayed for deliverance. It was not forthcoming.

West from Egypt, along the fertile North African coast only the ubiquitous Bedu survived in any numbers. The city and town dwellers disappeared into the invaders’ sharp-fanged maws.

Three globes, three out of a total of seventy-three in this wave — fifty-eight of them in the Europe/North Africa force, were all it took to overrun, in a matter of days, the seats of one of Earth’s most ancient civilizations, that and the broad sweep of one of its most ancient areas of barbarism.

Three additional globes were sufficient to drive the Italians, such as lived, reeling into the Apennines and staggering north to the Alps. The streets of the Roman Forum echoed with the clatter of the invaders’ claws on ancient cobblestones.

In the ruins of Madrid the last survivors of the Spanish Legion battled to the death amongst the shattered stones of El Prado. Elsewhere throughout Iberia, Spanish and Portuguese soldiers died at their posts to gain a few days, a few hours, for their civilians to reach the shelter of the Pyrenees, and the Sub-Urban — underground, in this case — towns waiting there. In some cases, this was sufficient.

Four globes had landed in once-sunny Iberia.

England felt as many of the enemy touch her soil. Yet the English had succeeded in raising an army suited to her station. The Posleen who landed there met only cold, bitter resistance, walls of stone and walls of flying shards from artillery. In the end, the United Kingdom managed to hang on to her territory and people from a line just south of Hadrian’s Wall. This was no mean achievement.

The single globe devoted to the Swiss and Austrians made the mistake of landing in a fortified Swiss valley. Hidden guns suddenly appeared all around the landing site. Infantry that could be numbered among the best and sharpest shooting in the world sprang up as if from nowhere. The Posleen force that had touched down disappeared without survivors.

The single globe each that landed on Belgium and Holland left only those survivors as managed to escape to Germany.

France and Poland, bearing the brunt of the Posleen effort, found themselves drawn and quartered. Paris held out for the nonce, as did Warsaw. A few other cities, prepared for defense in advance, did as well. Neither French nor Poles could be said to have been quite prepared for the magnitude and ferocity of the attack. Wishful thinking had beguiled the French while the Poles, never so numerous, still struggled under the legacy of forty-five years of Communist misrule and its resulting inefficiency and corruption.

Charitably, it could at least be said of both that they had fought hard, died well, and brought no disgrace upon their ancestors.

Seven globes hit Germany, bearing nearly thirty million Posleen. These were globes commanded by Kessentai that Athenalras didn’t like very much or think very highly of. There were thirteen large panzer Korps — thirty-nine panzer and twenty-six panzergrenadier divisions, though many times that in infantry, to meet them.

The odds in Germany were worse for the Posleen than they had ever faced in their history. Five of those heavy divisions awaiting them were called “Wiking, Hohenstauffen, Frundsberg, Jugend and Götz von Berlichingen.” One battalion was called the “501^st Schwere Panzer (Michael Wittmann).”

Paris, France, 27 March 2007

It was snowing outside when the phone rang.

Her husband had had time to make one call, and that very brief. “I love you, Isabelle. Always remember that. But it turns out that this threat you denied is real, after all. And it looks like it is concentrating on us and the Poles. My unit will be in action soon. You, however, must get yourself and the boys ready to flee. I cannot tell you where to go to or how to get there. But watch the news carefully. Do not trust everything the government says. And when it is time to move, move you must… and quickly.”

Then, as if her answering that she understood were some kind of signal, the husband had said again, “Remember I love you,” just before the phone went dead.

The next hours were filled with frantic packing of long unused camping equipment, food, and some minimum essential winter clothing. Why had she not packed sooner? Isabelle cursed herself. With each new series of meteorlike, incoming flashes of death from space the conviction had grown that she had made a terrible mistake.

She couldn’t stop blaming the Americans, though, for needlessly bringing on this war.

As Isabelle packed one bag after another, her elder son, Thomas, had taken them down to the family automobile and carefully stowed them.

Once the car was packed, Isabelle strapped into its usual place the restraining seat for the baby of the family. Then she and Thomas cleared away the accumulated snow from the windows.

Wäller Kaserne, Westerburg, Germany, 27 March 2007

Outside the headquarters snow fell, driven by the wind and collecting in drifts chaotically. Inside, paper and words flew in an equal blizzard. But inside, the will of one man reigned over the chaos of the frightful news.

“Major landings at Ingolstadt, Tübingen, Aschaffenburg, Meissen, Schwerin, Nienburg, and Guemmersbach, Herr Generalleutnant,” announced the aide de camp, Rolf, finger stabbing down at each fresh Posleen infestation marked on the table-borne map. “Minor ones all over the map.”

The phone rang. Neither Posleen invasion nor four years of steady allied bombing during the Second World War had ever quite succeeded in inconveniencing the Bundespost, the German telephone system.

“Generalleutnant, it is the chancellor for you.”

Mühlenkampf took the phone, announcing himself.

He listened for several minutes before answering, “Yes, Herr Kanzler, I understand. You can count on the 47^th Panzer Korps.”

The general replaced the phone on its cradle, exhaling forcefully. To his staff he explained, “The infantry is folding and running almost everywhere. Some of the towns are holding though. Aschaffenburg has fallen, but Würzburg and Schweinfurt are holding out. We are going to move south, relieve those towns, and destroy the invaders utterly.”

The aide listened for the remaining words. Those words remained unspoken. Finally, he asked, “What about our left and right units, Herr General?”

Mühlenkampf shook his head. “The other twelve heavy Korps are already committed. The only infantry in range to have any effect is crushed… they were crushed in a matter of hours. We’re on our own in this.”

The autobahn was a steady-moving river of vehicles, both soft and armored. Civilians moved north in two streams to either side. Their faces were haggard, drawn, frightened.

Mixed in among the civilians, mostly weaponless, trudged soldiers in the thousands. These were broken men, from broken formations. Leaderless, these men were also demoralized, dispirited and disheveled.

Off from the autobahn, at a distance, Brasche stood in the turret of Anna, watching the mixed crowd pass. Their eyes filled briefly with hope at the Tiger’s imposing heft and incredibly vicious-looking gun. Then, one and all, the refugees would glance behind them, remember what they had seen, the horrors of Posleen on a feeding frenzy, and hopelessly trudge on.

Hans understood. He had seen it before. He had been a part of it before.

It was a warm spring afternoon. Winter was past now, fully past. It had been a long one… and bitter.

So had the march to escape Soviet captivity and near certain death been a bitter one. Brasche remembered it in all too much detail: the burning of the standards, the surrender of the other soldiers, the massacre of prisoners he had witnessed from nearby. Then came the wet cold nights racing through Austria to outrun the Reds’ inexorable advance.

Amidst the debris of war and defeat, Brasche had searched for a uniform to fit him, finally finding one on the corpse of a dead Wehrmacht sergeant. Still, while he could burn his SS garb, he could not so easily remove the tattoo on his left side that marked him indelibly as a member.

So west he headed, ever west into the setting sun. France was his goal, as it had become the goal of many of those who survived the surrender of the Wiking Division. The Legion was to become home for as many as could find shelter within it. The Legion asked no questions of a man who preferred, for the sake of his life, not to answer any.

At length, Brasche came upon another group of German soldiers, sitting quietly in an open field by a road. Near Stuttgart this was. A noncom wearing a funny-looking, coffee can cap with a bill stood among the Germans nonchalantly taking names and writing them into a ledger.

Hans recognized the cap, recognized too the calm and contentment of the German soldiers. Amidst the trash of defeat, Hans Brasche had found the Legion.

Hammelburg, Germany, 27 March 2007

The roadside was littered with everything from abandoned baby carriages to mattresses to cars that, out of gas, had been pushed aside to make room for the advancing Korps. Already drifting snow was beginning to cover the debris. It was also covering some bodies of those too faint of heart or weak in the will to live to go on.

This is defeat, an old voice in Hans’ head reminded him. Avoid it.

From somewhere behind his Tiger came the sound of artillery, lots of it, firing. The shells’ passage rattled the air with the racket of one hundred freight trains. In Brasche’s ears, the radio crackled with reports from the Korps’ forward reconnaissance unit, the Panzeraufklärungsbrigade, Florian Geyer.[34] The enemy was near at hand.

Up just past the autobahn bridge over the river south of the town the lead panzer division, Hohenstauffen, sprang to more active life. Tanks and infantry fighting vehicles pivot steered to get off of the road and into a semblance of order. Panicked civilians did their best to dodge the metal flood, though that best was not always good enough. The Hohenstauffen drivers did their best to avoid killing any of their own. That best was likewise not always good enough.

Once clear of the autobahn and the refugees the tanks and infantry carriers raced forward to take up positions behind a low ridge, infantry moving closer in to hug the dead ground behind the military crest, tanks taking position further back to rake the area between the military crest and the top of the ridge.

Though heavily armored enough to stand up to Posleen fire, from directly in front at least, Brasche’s tank Anna and her sister Tiger IIIs did not take the lead. Instead, spread out with almost two kilometers between tanks, they pulled in furthest from the ridgeline. Once halted the Tigers automatically analyzed their firing sectors. In a few cases minor adjustments in position were made. Once settled, each Tiger began to ooze out a quick-drying camouflage foam from a system built under license from the Americans. Brasche stood in the turret while a small mountain of foam rose and hardened around Anna, the main gun depressing fully to allow the foam to drip to and blend with the snow on the ground. Though the foam could be colored, in this case it remained its natural white to blend in with the falling snow.

Brasche stood in the command hatch while foam settled below. A quick look around satisfied him with the progress of the camouflage job. He gave a command and Anna brought him safe into her womb below.

“Commander on deck,” intoned Dieter, remaining in his gunner’s seat but bracing to a stiff, modified attention. The rest of the crew, minus Krueger who pretended not to notice, did likewise.

Hans took over the command chair his assistant commander vacated for him and focused his attention on the situation display on the forward. The board was updated continuously with reports from the Florian Geyer Brigade, the other units forward of the Tigers and just now making contact, reports from towns now under siege and even one doomed sortie by the Luftwaffe that had managed to send back some information before being flash-burned from the sky.

“Report,” Brasche ordered.

From in front, in a position to take full advantage of the situation board when it was displayed as a forward view-screen, Krueger reported, “Driving station, full up, Herr Oberst.”

Like clockwork, keying off of Krueger’s response, the secondary armament gunners reported down the line. Well trained by now, their eyes never left their own view-screens as they did so.

The tank and battalion exec, Schmidt, reported on logistic status. The ammunition racks were full, fuel was only at about seventy-five percent but the refueling vehicles were within easy range. Brasche raised a quieting hand when the XO began to go into such mundane items as food and water.

Engineering reported the tank was mechanically fully capable of movement, though actual movement must await the drying of the camouflage foam.

Lastly Dieter Schultz answered that the main gun was ready, but unloaded.

Hans looked again at the view-screen. The indicators were that the horde of Posleen infantry would be the first to reach the hastily drawn line of defense. He keyed his microphone. “Odd numbered Tigers load antipersonnel. Even numbers load antispacecraft. Second rounds to be area denial. Third rounds to be antispacecraft.”

There came the faint whining of machinery as Dieter’s loader selected three twelve-inch rounds from the fifty carried in a carousel well below the turret level. These moved upward under robotic control. Overhead, the metal breech opened with a clang faintly audible even behind the armor of the cocoon. There was more whining as the propellant was fed from its storage area behind the turret into the open breech. Then there came a final clang as the breech slammed home and locked into position.

“Gun up,” announced Schultz as soon as the green light appeared on the gunner’s console in front of him. In Brasche’s earpiece his three companies of four Tigers each likewise reported ready for action.

Dieter Schultz, good man that he was, scanned his screen for targets continuously. He had done this so much in training that it barely took a fraction of his concentration to do so. This was a good thing as the bulk of his mind was occupied with thoughts of Gudrun.

Giessen, Germany, 27 March 2007

The first letter had been hard to write. Gudrun despised herself for having to hurt a boy who had done his best to bring her only happiness. Yet, hateful or not, it had had to be done, Gudrun knew. She had been close to Pieter, very close. But one look at Dieter had been enough for her to know that here was the one, the perfect one for her.

And to her own heart she had to be true.

So she had written the letter, putting in her wishes that a boy somewhere to the north could somehow understand and forgive that she had found another. Then she had sealed it, shed a small tear for the pain she knew it was to bring a boy who had never done or wished her anything but good.

The second letter was easier, a joy in fact. Though she had Dieter’s e-mail address, and the tank he had said he fought in had integral e-mail, there was no way to send her little gift, a lock of golden hair — freshly clipped and tied with a ribbon, via electrons. She searched through her desk for a picture and came up with a wallet-sized color photo, a high school picture. This, too, she placed in the letter.

Writing finished, Gudrun walked the short distance to the post, purchased and attached stamps, and deposited the missive through the slot. Then she returned to her parents’ house.

Once there, she turned on the television. The news — and news was all the stations were carrying — was full of the fighting raging across Europe and Germany. Little of that news was good. Especially to the north was there cause for concern.

Marburg an der Lahn, Germany, 27 March 2007

Fulungsteeriot was not among the brightest of the Posleen Kessentai. He suspected, in his somewhat dim way, that that was what had gotten his oolt’pos assigned to the central sector of this wave’s intended conquest.

Though the thresh here ran, sometimes, leaving their open backs to the Posleen’s railguns and boma blades, often enough they fought bitterly. Especially was this true of the men who drove and fought from the thresh’s ground tenaral. Fortunately, in his sector, Fulungsteeriot’s oolt had met few of the nasty, hateful, cowardly threshkreen machines. Those few, usually taking positions in dead space to rake over the People as they galloped over crests or around hills or buildings, had taken a fearful toll. Only leading the horde of ground-bound normals with the God Kings’ own tenar or with armed landing vessels could flush out these disgustingly cowardly prey in a usefully timely fashion. And that had its own attendant risks, as the wretches refused to come out and fight in the open like warriors. That, and that their hand weapons, while generally primitive and inferior to those of the people, were not to be despised, either. And they seemed to seek out the tenar-riding God Kings with single-minded ferocity.

Moreover, there were scattered reports, frightening ones, of actions by huge thresh fighting machines that arose, seemingly, from the ground to smash down the People’s vessels with brutal and deadly accurate fire. Fulungsteeriot was more than a little happy that his group had not yet met any of the thresh “Tigers,” as they were called.

Fulungsteeriot was more than happy, as well, that he had the use of his landers to crush resistance in the path of his horde.

Hammelburg, Germany, 28 March 2007

Though in the rear of the defensive line, the lay of the land dictated that it would be the Tigers who first saw the oncoming tidal wave of Posleen cresting the ridge.

Schultz’s eyes opened wide as first a horde of flyers ascended over the mass, followed by a solid phalanx of centaur flesh. “Liebe Gott im Himmel.” Dear God in Heaven.

Hans calmly issued an order to the battalion, “Odd numbered Tigers stand by to unmask and engage on my command.”

At his words, Schultz took a firmer grip of the control spades from which he ran the gun, whispering, “Magnification 24x.” The tank’s human-built artificial intelligence system immediately closed the apparent range. Schultz repeated, “Liebe Gott,” as the mass of aliens sprang suddenly into sharp relief. His hands visibly tightened on the controls.

“Do not fire until I give the command,” reminded Brasche, forcing his mind to intense concentration.

Even as Brasche spoke the snow began falling with renewed intensity, the external remote cameras going white with natural static.

“The command to fire will be the opening of the machine gun,” whispered sous-officier Brasche, of the Legion, to the squad assembled around him in the dank and fetid Indochinese jungle. “Any questions?”

Seeing there would be none, Hans pointed northward towards a trail intersection known to be used by the Viet Minh. Wordlessly, the point man, a veteran of the Latvian SS Division once — now a veteran of the Legion Etranger, took the lead and disappeared into the green maze. Brasche followed directly, machine gun team in tow. The rest of the squad, moving single file, followed Brasche.

Berlin, Germany, 28 March 2007

The Tir’s AID projected a hologram in the air over his desk. The hologram showed a map of Europe and North Africa, centered on Germany.

“Stupid centaurs,” the Tir muttered aloud. “Landing most of their force elsewhere and half leaving the Germans alone. Don’t they realize that delay could prove deadly, that these people are not to be underestimated?”

Even as the Tir watched that portion of the map that showed the red of Posleen infestation expanded throughout most of the area, even while it reshaped and deformed, and in places shrank, in Germany. His superiors would be pleased, he knew, at the former. Yet explanations might be required for the latter, explanations he was by no means looking forward to giving.

“Foolish reptiles. Taking the easy meat and ignoring the looming threat.”

The strangely shaped human servant with the disgusting hair color knocked lightly on the Tir’s door. “Herr Stössel to see you, Herr Tir.”

About time, thought the Darhel.

Günter entered and, without taking a seat, placed a briefcase gently upon the Tir’s desktop. “These are the plans you required, Lord Tir,” Günter said.

The Tir nodded. “These will be useful to our interests. Are they complete?” he asked.

“Sadly, not, mein Herr. Oh, yes, we have gotten most of them. But one group refuses to so much as discuss their orders and intentions with anyone but the chancellor. And the chancellor refuses to discuss them with anyone at all.”

“Those ancient warriors? The ones you call the SS?”

Günter’s face twisted into a sneer. “Yes, them,” he answered. “They are out of control.”

The sneer disappeared momentarily as Günter wondered at that. He had been so sure, so utterly certain, that the military mindset had had any forms of disobedience driven from it. After all, hadn’t the Bundeswehr rolled over for restrictions guaranteed and intended to be insulting beyond the endurance of mortal man? Oh, well. Perhaps they are not “soldiers like other soldiers,” after all, as they claimed to be. They must be the madmen I have always considered them to be. Mad dogs, to be put down.

“They are also out of… oversight,” observed the Tir. “With every other part of your force we have no trouble eavesdropping. But these SS refuse to so much as let one of our AIDs near them.”

Günter agreed, “They are as out of step with technology as they are out of step socially. Even their colleagues in the regular Bundeswehr shake their heads with wonder. These old men think so much alike they barely even use their radios.”

“And I have no idea what they are doing,” the Tir cursed.

So far, the lines had held, and held well. Though a glance at the red-spotted map in Mühlenkampf’s headquarters might make it appear to the unlettered observer that Germany was on its way to being overrun, that appearance would have been false. Ingolstadt’s infestation was contained. The Bavarian Panzer Korps, with the aid of two Korps of fairly good mountain infantry, was reducing the landing at Tübingen.

At Meissen, Schwerin, Nienburg, and Guemmersbach the question would remain somewhat open until the two panzer Korps at Ingolstadt and the one at Tübingen could finish off the remnants of the Posleen, reorganize and move to reinforce the others. Yet the men at those places were still holding.

The only really bad news was at the northern Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg, which had seen all her citizens erased, along with the better part of a Korps of infantry. All that stood in the way of the Posleen victors of that slaughter were some much-despised relics of a half-forgotten war — those, and the young men they had been allowed to contaminate with out-of-date views of the world…

Hammelburg, Germany, 29 March 2007

“Sixty-seven landers just over the horizon, heading this way,” announced Brasche’s 1c, or intelligence officer, from the station where he did dual duty as that and as close-in defense gunner.

“What kind?” Brasche demanded.

“A mixed bag, mein Herr. Brigade Florian Geyer can barely make out rough shapes in all this snow. Even the thermal imagers are having problems. What we have seen indicates as many C-Decs as Lampreys.”

“Will they see us here, under our camouflage foam?” wondered Brasche, aloud.

Though the question was rhetorical, the 1c answered, “Florian Geyer appears still alive and still broadcasting. Perhaps the enemy isn’t any better at dealing with this white shit than we are.”

“Perhaps not,” mused Brasche. He repeated on the general circuit, “All panzers, hold fire until my command. Boys, we’re going to play a little trick…”

Marburg an der Lahn, Germany, 29 March 2007

What a dirty, filthy trick, thought Pieter Friedenhof, crumbling the letter he’d received from Gudrun with the morning meal. “That fucking bitch,” he said aloud. “The stone-cold cast-iron twat,” he fumed. “How dare she leave me at a time like this? And for some low-browed Nazi?”

The boy broke down and wept for a time, even as he cursed the name of “battle maiden.” With each curse and each wracking sob he felt trickle away the very reasons he had been willing to stand fast and die, if need be, to defend his home, his family, his girl.

Weather reports spoke of snow coming from the south, but Pieter felt already as if a blizzard had descended upon his heart and soul.

Hammelburg, Germany, 29 March 2007

The radio crackled in Brasche’s ears, “Battalion Michael Wittmann? Mühlenkampf hier.”

“501st Schwere Panzer hier, Herr General.”

“Brasche? Gut. Very good. Look Hansi, we’ve got a problem. We’ve held the enemy along this line for two days now but it looks like they’ve given up unsupported frontal charges for the nonce. I’d be happy for the breather except that those fucking landers are going to chew up our forward men something awful. I want you to — ”

“General, I have an idea,” Hans interrupted.

For a moment the radio was silent: Mühlenkampf mulling the Knight’s Cross he knew hung at Brasche’s throat.

“What’s your idea, Hansi?”

“Have everyone on the forward trace except the dismounted infantry shut down completely. Hold the line with artillery — the shells are holding up well, yes?”

“We’ve enough,” conceded Mühlenkampf. “But the reports are clear, Brasche: there are always leakers through the heaviest barrage.”

“Not so many that the riflemen and machine gunners can’t handle, for a while anyway, Herr General. And if you keep using the panzers those C-Decs and Lampreys will eat them for a snack.”

“Taking care of those is your job, Hans,” Mühlenkampf insisted.

Brasche wiped a few beads of sweat, nervous sweat, from his forehead. “Yes, Herr General. But at five-to-one odds I won’t be able to do enough… not without a little cleverness.”

“Wait, out,” ordered Mühlenkampf as he tried to force rational thought through a sleep-starved brain.

Brasche insisted, “There’s little time to decide, sir. My way has a chance.”

“What is your way, Hansi?”

Brasche proceeded to explain. As he did so those of his own crew grew wide-eyed and shuddering. Was their commander stark raving mad?

Marburg an der Lahn, Germany, 29 March 2007

“This is madness,” muttered the demoralized Friedenhof from the relative safety of a reverse slope. “Madness.”

In the boy’s ears, the sound of the enemy grew ever closer, an ominous cacophony as distinct from the overhead rattle of defending artillery as, in a more traditional day, had been the pounding of hoofs from setting of pikes or the drawing of sabers. As steadily as grew the crescendo of clawed feet tramping ground, boma blades being drawn, hisses and snorts and incomprehensible grunts, each foot soldier of the 165^th Infantry division felt and even seemed to hear his own heart pounding ever more frenziedly in his chest.

Suddenly, like a cloud of mist arising from a river, the enemy appeared. He came first as a swarm of flying sleds, the God Kings’ tenars. These the snipers of the division Jaeger[35] battalion took under fire. Yet there were more tenar than snipers, and they were hard to hit and, oh, very well armed. Though more than a few of the sleds disappeared in actinic spheres, snipers were blasted to bits and burned to cinders by return fire for each tiny victory they earned over the invaders.

Scant minutes following the appearance of the tenar-riding God Kings, Friedenhof’s eyes widened as the rest of the host made its sudden appearance. They appeared to him as a solid mass, a veritable phalanx of reptilian, centauroid flesh — all snapping teeth and flashing blades. Artillery began carving huge slices from that body, as from the bodies that composed it. Yellow flesh and blood, yellow bone and sinew soon festooned the very top of the landmass to Friedenhof’s front.

Heedless of the losses, the alien horde swarmed down and towards the reverse military crest along which the defenders had erected their defenses.

Suddenly, on command, the Germans began to lash back. MG-3s, direct descendants of “Hitler’s Zipper” of World War Two fame, lent the air the sound of an impossibly large number of sails being ripped apart at the hands of an impossible number of giants. Prone gunners were pushed back by the hammering recoil of their guns. The air filled with the smell of cordite and weapons oil boiling away from heated feed mechanisms. Posleen screamed and reared and stumbled and writhed in every manner of undignified death by lead.

Coming through the hell of lead and fire the defenders poured forth, the Posleen next hit a thin line of the mines called “Bouncing Barbies.” These devices, accidental byproducts of an impromptu experiment gone badly awry at distant Fort Bragg, North Carolina, years before, waited patiently for the sense of the enemy sufficiently close and in sufficient numbers.

A knot of twenty Posleen, perhaps as much trying to avoid the worst of the shell and machine gun fire as to close with the humans, activated a Barbie. The mine used a small, integral antigravity device to lift itself one meter into the air. It then put out a linear force field to a distance of six meters. Eleven Posleen fell immediately, alive but legless, their stumps waving helplessly in the air while they shrieked and sprayed yellow ichor into the air and onto the ground.

Its work done for the nonce, the force field shut off to conserve power even as the mine’s antigravity propelled it sideways to cover another small piece of the front. Amidst the yellow blood, the mine’s yellow plastic casing quickly became indistinguishable.

It had only been through the last-minute agency of the Americans that the Germans even had Barbies. Their own political left, or so much of it as the Darhel had been able to suborn, had prevented development of any such unpalatable devices as new mines on their own. As they had prevented the development of usefully small and clean nuclear weapons… and poisons… and anything that smacked of militarism. “No threat can justify the development of such horrid arms,” had been the cry. “No threat could possibly justify…”

Thus, despite last minute emergency deliveries, the German army had but few Barbies, and fewer nuclear and antimatter munitions.

Hammelburg, Germany, 29 March 2007

“All panzers, load antilander munitions. Prepare for a steady stream of depleted uranium. Adjust yield for the targets as per doctrine. And be fucking quiet.”

Half the battalion had already loaded rounds designed to deal with Posleen landers. The other half began the process of opening breaches, withdrawing propellant casings and projectiles, and reloading with depleted uranium penetrators and their more powerful propellants.

The loading went quickly and smoothly. Though they had tried, the suborned left had not been able to interfere with the building of German precision machinery. Even the formerly Communist east had for the most part overcome the red-inspired tendency to produce mechanical dreck in the interests of meeting norms and quotas.

As for the DU penetrators themselves, the left would have shrieked their fury to a ritually denied Heaven could they have known how the otherwise simple rounds had been modified… and why. The use of depleted uranium itself had been a close run thing in the Bundestag, the German Parliament. “Ecologically unsound. Environmentally unsafe. Polluting… filthy.” Aesthetically unappealing. Heretical. Upsets me at my vegetarian breakfast. Forces me to contemplate that which must be denied.

But the left had never known, indeed had had the information concealed from them, that each DU penetrator had been partially hollowed out to make room for a modest amount of antimatter in a containment field. An American firm, working clandestinely with the BND, had developed and provided the weapons, again at nearly the last minute. These, penetrator and carefully contained antimatter, had been mated in great secrecy.

The antimatter device was unique. It had been desired to have a variable-yield weapon, something like the unspeakably politically incorrect tactical nuclear weapons once possessed by both the Americans and Russians. Yet, if depleted uranium had raised a furor, how much worse would have been the ruckus over Germany developing nuclear weapons? Antimatter did not generate quite the same knee-jerk reaction, even though it was generally less fine-tunable than nuclear munitions.

A solution was found to the problem of variable yield, although it was not a solution without its costs and complexities. That solution was a dual containment field. The primary field, which normally held all the antimatter, was very strong, strong enough, indeed to withstand the explosion of a portion of the projectile’s antimatter right next to it. The secondary was weaker, and rather unstable, relatively speaking.

It was possible, with the device, to dial a given amount, up to roughly thirty percent of the antimatter contained in the primary field, into the secondary. Any greater amount would destroy the primary and create a very large, antimatter-driven, explosion. But with the lesser, the primary field would hold even as the projectile, now given a substantial boost by the lesser explosion, drove through the far wall of the enemy lander. A timer would detonate the remaining antimatter when it was high enough not to appreciably affect the Earth.

There was, of course, the possibility of having all the antimatter go off in a single cosmic catastrophe. This, of course, might well affect the Earth and the people who, in ever diminishing numbers, populated it.

It was also possible to set the weapon for no antimatter explosion. In that case, the antimatter would remain entirely within the primary containment field and never, in theory, explode until it reached a point far out in space.

Thus thirteen Panzerkampfwagen VIII As, colloquially known as Tiger IIIs, loaded between them enough antimatter to flatten a small city, even a stone-built German small city.

Marburg an der Lahn, Germany, 29 March 2007

The ancient stone castle stood silent and untroubled, overwatching the ancient town below. From his hastily scraped fighting position, the castle and town beckoned Pieter Friedenhof with the hint, if not the promise, of safety.

“It’s madness, madness I say!” shouted Pieter to his chief, a small and determined looking Hauptgefreiter manning an MG-3. “Madness to stay here.”

“Shut up, Friedenhof, you pussy, and — ”

The gunner’s next words were lost as a Posleen three-millimeter railgun round caused his head to explode in a shower of red mist and red and ivory flecks. Pieter took but a single glance before emitting a wordless shriek. More than half crazed himself with fear, Friedenhof turned from his dead comrade, turned from his gun, turned from his duty.

The boy began to run. As he did, others nearby saw. They too began to desert their posts. Like an epidemic, swiftly and without understanding on the part of its carriers, the panic spread. This portion of the front knew a rapid collapse.

Hammelburg, Germany, 29 March 2007

Even some of the men of SS-trained 47^th Panzer Korps had their limits. Under the sustained fire of sixty-seven Posleen craft a few men here and there on the forward trace had begun to run. In Brasche’s screen he saw a platoon of Leopards break cover and run from what could only have been a Posleen reconnaissance by fire. The tanks’ sprint for safety carried them scant yards before a plasma beam slagged, first one, then another, and still a third. The fourth Leopard, the platoon leader’s tank from the turret numbers, skidded to a stop untouched. The crew began bailing out frantically.

The plasma beam touched the tank, igniting it instantly. Caught in the heat-bloom, the four crewmen were heat-seared, flash-cooked. Their writhing bodies fell smoking onto the fresh snow, their own heat melting through it.

“Christ,” whispered Brasche, the name coming familiar to his lips even though it had been years, decades really, since he had believed.

The Posleen landers apparently grew tired of playing cat and mouse with the defenders, spoiled idiot boys bored with their play. Half an hour after flushing that one platoon of Leopards, scant reward for so much effort, they ceased fire and began a stately move northward.

“Steady, boys… wait for the command…”

Brasche never tapped his machine gunner to command the beginning of the ambush. The harvest walked by unreaped and confident.

“An understrength platoon of Viet Minh,” Intelligence had insisted. “Not more than twenty of the little yellow Commie bastards. Your squad should be able to handle them easily.”

Hans cursed the damned frog intelligence officer, though the near presence of over ninety of the enemy ensured that he cursed silently. He wondered if the effort at silence was in vain; the Viets ought to be able to hear his heart pounding.

How could they be so wrong, those “intelligence” maggots? He wondered, as well. The signs are everywhere to see if they only had eyes to see. The enemy grows in strength daily, while we grow weaker. Why deny the reality we face every day? We’re losing this war, too.

But we won’t lose for lack of trying on my part, Hans thought, determination growing in his heart. He quietly patted his machine gunner — BE STILL. As the last of the Viet Minh passed his position, Hans stood, quietly and carefully. He drew his knife, faced up the trail in the direction into which the Communists had faded, and began, silently, to follow.

The enemy landers moved without a perceptible sound, gliding along on their heavy-duty antigravity drives. Although there was no sound, the antigravity created a feeling in those caught below like unto a mix of nausea and the sense of having millions of ants crawling over one’s body. One was passing directly over the Tiger Anna now.

Caught in the sickening field, Brasche resisted the desperate urge to scratch. Dieter Schultz’s friend Harz could not resist the need to vomit. Soon, despite the efforts of the Tiger’s air cleaners, the vile aroma of human puke filled the fighting bay. That odor initiated a chain reaction. Soon Brasche looked down upon a crew of quietly cursing, frantically scratching, and intermittently vomiting men.

All looked utterly and hopelessly miserable.

Hans forced his own gorge down repeatedly. He kept his attention fixed on the tactical display, showing each of his Tigers, the sixty-seven enemy landers, and the trace outlines of the 47^th Panzer Korps. At length he saw that all of the enemy had passed.

“Achtung! Panzer! Boys, crank ’em and turn ’em around one hundred and eighty degrees. We’re going to follow these bastards, shooting them in the ass all the way, until none are left. Kill them from the rearmost forward. Kill them as you bear.”

Ahead at the driver’s station Krueger gave off an evil laugh. Likewise did most of the men. Only Schultz, face frozen to his gunner’s sight, did not.

The tank began to hum as natural gas from its two main fuel cylinders began feeding the huge Siemens electrical generator that drove the engines. A steady vibration arose as Krueger applied the power and twisted the steering column. From outside the panzers it looked like thirteen small avalanches as the snow-covered foam cracked, tore and powdered. The well-trained Schultz was already twisting his gunner’s spade to turn the multihundred-ton turret to line up the huge 12-inch smoothbore cannon on the nearest of the enemy.

“Gunner!” ordered Brasche, “Sabot! DU-AM… point one kiloton. C-Dec!”

“Target!” answered Schultz, as one finger dialed the charge in the penetrator down to one tenth its potential power.

“Feuer!”

The last Vietminh in the snaking column never knew what hit him. Brasche’s feet, silently padding along the soft jungle floor, gave no warning. The thick tropical growth overhead hid the moonlight from making a tell-tale flash from the knife. All the doughty little Communist knew was that a sudden hand clamped over his mouth even as an agonizingly cold dart lunged into his kidneys.

Overcome with the worst agony a man can know, a pierced kidney, the Viet made no sound. Some pains are too great even to permit a scream. It was a relief to the dying soldier when Brasche eased him down to the dank floor and drew the razor-sharp knife across his jugular.

Knife still in hand, Hans Brasche followed the column seeking his next victim, another Vietminh too much concerned with the dangers and difficulties ahead, too little with creeping death from behind.

Dieter would never forget that first image of the death of the C-Dec. Each tiny moment was engraved into his memory, of course. He would always feel the click of the firing button under his thumb. He would never quite forget the tremendous roar that shook even to the bowels of a seventeen-hundred-ton tank. The shock of recoil too would remain with him, the massive cylinders compressing until they could go no more, even though aided by the inertia-inverting devices once tested by Schlüssel and Breitenbach. He would recall the tank’s rear suspension taking up the rest, then the sudden vicious spring back from full battery into firing position… the stout knock to his head that even his padded gunner’s sight could not quite mute.

But it was the death of the enemy he would always remember best.

That death began as a faint flash on the C-Dec’s hull. So faint and quick was it that the eye barely registered. In what seemed the tiniest moment came the real flash, as the antimatter within, deliberately set to its lowest practical setting, came into contact with true matter.

This Dieter could not, of course, see. Nor did he see the remaining antimatter, that not released by the primary — and stronger — containment field. What he could and did see was the image of light suddenly streaking out in linear fashion from each of the corner junctures of the alien ship’s twelve sides. The light would have been blinding to the naked eye. Even in Dieter’s thermal sight the picture overloaded briefly.

In that instant of overloading, the Posleen ship came apart. When his image returned, Dieter saw twelve separate pieces, flying in twelve directions.

“Holy Christ,” muttered the gunner.

“Christ, holy or otherwise, has nothing to do with it, boy,” answered Brasche. “Gunner!” he ordered, “Sabot! DU, inert. Lamprey!”

To Anna’s right and left, other panzers spit out destruction even as Schultz searched in his sight for his next victim.

Seven khaki-clad bodies lay upon the trail behind him. Seven times had Hans’ knife swept and the red blood splashed. And still young Brasche pursued. There was an eighth victim ahead, even a ninetieth if the strength of his arm held out.

“I don’t understand this,” said Harz. “We are slaughtering them from behind like so many deer. They have to notice us. Why haven’t they reacted?”

“It isn’t a question of what is there to be seen. I have seen the reports on the Posleen ships myself,” Brasche answered. “They can see us. Absolutely, they can. Their ships sensors are more than capable of that.”

“Then what, Herr Oberst?” queried Harz.

“We’re here to be seen, Unteroffizier. But they just are concentrating on other threats and opportunities elsewhere. To their front, specifically. And even if one has seen us? They do not communicate or coordinate very well.”

In Hans’ view another dim shape, a C-Dec he was certain, began to materialize. “Gunner! Sabot! DU-AM… point one kiloton. C-Dec!”

“Target!”

“Feuer!”

Marburg an der Lahn, Germany, 29 March 2007

Friedenhof ran, his lungs straining at the bitter cold air. Snow swirled around everywhere, everywhere blotting out sight. No matter, young Pieter’s eyes were fixed on the barely perceived snow-covered ground to his front. His own beating footsteps and the pounding of his own blood in his ears drowned out the sounds of massacre coming from behind. They drowned out, too, the soft padding of alien claws on the snow-covered ground behind him. Friedenhof missed completely the hiss of a boma blade being drawn. He had no clue of its descent.

Even the fall of his dismembered body was softened and hushed by the new fallen snow. Pieter never heard.

In the awkward confines of his command ship Fulungsteeriot rejoiced aloud, his followers baying around him. That for Athenalras and his sacrifice mission into the center of this continent. The thresh, these dreaded gray-clad thresh, were in a pure panic, running hither and yon. Briefly, Fulungsteeriot knew a moment of regret; the more they ran the less food they could provide his host.

But — never mind! The thresh-filled town of Giessen lay ahead; a town, he was sure, swarming with young and tender flesh. The host would eat well, this day… and for many days yet to come.

Hammelburg, Germany, 29 March 2007

Brasche’s fingers drummed the arm of his command chair nervously. It had been some time since the last report of a kill or an engagement had come in. “I am curious, 1c. How many have we accounted for?”

The intelligence officer turned from his weapons station to face Brasche. “Herr Oberst, the battalion has taken out forty-nine, so far. But all panzers report the same: there are no more to be found ahead.”

Schultz asked aloud, “Do you think they’re on to us, Herr Oberst?”

“I don’t know, Dieter. But I think that might be the way to bet it.”

Brasche considered for a moment, then touched the communication button built into his command chair. “All Tigers,” he commanded, “all Tigers. Halt and lager around this position. Number One company, you have from six to ten o’clock. Number Two, ten o’clock to two o’clock. Three, two to six. Two thousand meters between tanks.”

All three of Brasche’s company commanders answered “Wilco” instantaneously. Brasche was quite gratified to see all three companies begin moving across his tactical display nearly as quickly. And then…

The strain in the company commander’s voice was palpable, even over the radio. “Battalion this is Number One Company… Number one to Battalion. Enemy here… Too many to… Scheisse, Scheisse, Scheisse![36]… Turn this damned tank arou — ”

Brasche acted instantly. “All units, action left. Move it boys, Number One company’s in trouble.”

Without waiting for the order, a cursing Krueger cranked the steering as hard as it would go. With both tracks spinning in opposite directions at nearly top speed the Tiger’s turn was almost immediate. Even deep in the crew center the men could hear the high-pitched squealing of tortured tread. A few muttered prayers: Please, God, don’t let us throw a track.

The sudden turn tossed Harz from his seat to the metal floor and then bounced him across the deck. He gave off a painful grunt as the turn slammed him into the opposite side of the crew compartment. Harz managed to rise to his knees just in time for Krueger’s next maneuver, the sudden launching of the tank forward in its new direction. This sent him rolling to the rear.

Brasche looked down to where a stunned Harz had come to a bruising rest against the podium on which sat the command chair.

“Back to your station, Harz.”

Shaking his head to clear it, Harz -still on hands and knees — began working his way back to his duty position. As he reached it the radio crackled again.

The voice on the radio was preternaturally calm, “Battalion this is Leutnant Schiffer. Tiger 104 — and presumably Hauptmann Wohl and his crew — are dead. I have assumed command.”

“What happened to Wohl, Schiffer?” asked Brasche, then, on second thought, “Nevermind, tell me later. What is your condition?”

“Sir, I have three functional Tigers and about twelve to eighteen enemy ships trying to kill us. Visibility is rotten, even with the thermals. Every Tiger has taken at least one hit. The frontal armor is holding up well. The commander’s tank was hit in the rear with some kind of kinetic energy weapon. That immobilized it and the enemy were able to gang up and pound it to scrap.”

Hans Brasche’s mind drew a picture for him of one of his Tigers, helpless, while a force of the aliens’ landers took their time with taking it apart piece by piece.

Schiffer continued, “If they hadn’t stopped to finish off 104 they might well have gotten us all.”

Unseen by Schiffer, Hans nodded. He had seen such things before.

“I have the company facing the enemy and driving backwards towards you, Herr Oberst, but the enemy is damnably hard to engage in this weather when they know we are here. They are able to sense us, it seems, from further than we can sense them. If it weren’t for the quality of the frontal armor we’d all be dead by now.”

“Good lad, Schiffer,” Brasche answered. “We’re coming for you, son.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. But, sir? You had better hurry.”

Giessen, Germany, 29 March 2007

Fulungsteeriot rejoiced, “Onward my warriors. Hurry my children, lest the thresh escape.”

Like a yellow wave, broad and thick, the Posleen host lapped around the rock of Giessen, surrounding it. Occasionally a Posleen normal, or even a God King, would fall — the thresh trying their futile best to hold back the tide. Yet the wave diminished not at all. Soon, Giessen would be surrounded by the tide… and then the tide would come in… and the thresh drown in it.

Off to the south, along a road choked with escaping thresh, Fulungsteeriot observed with detachment the panic as the first of his warriors reached the crawling herd in their strange and primitive wheeled vehicles. The rendering soon began.

There was no time for an orderly butchering; the normals slaughtered the thresh as soon as they could reach them. The primitive vehicles were sliced open by boma blades to expose the rich flesh within. Amidst shrieks and plaintive pleas the thresh those vehicles contained were hauled forth, sometimes in pieces. Of those pulled out whole, a simple sweep of a blade ended their cries. Death for these thresh was sufficient for now; later others would do the detailed work.

Some thresh escaped, of course. Using the time unwillingly purchased by their brethren falling under the Posleen’s swords, these ran for their lives in stark terror across the snowy field to the east.

Gudrun saw a blade slice through the roof of the car in which she and her family had sought escape from the doom encircling the town. The blade passed through her wide-eyed, screaming mother from crown to hips before being withdrawn. Though the mother’s screams abruptly ceased, the sight of her separating neatly into two pieces, lengthwise, accompanied by a veritable wave of crimson brought forth an animal shriek from Gudrun. Then, as the iron smell of her own mother’s flooding blood assaulted her nostrils, instinct took over. She could not fight this; she must flee.

Indeed, Gudrun’s swearing father ordered her to run as he himself drew a large-bore pistol and fired two shots past the mother’s corpse into the Posleen mass. Gudrun never saw whether he hit anything or not.

The girl’s hand fumbled with the door release. The father fired several more times at the nearest Posleen; the roar of the shots both hurting her ears and lending urgency to her actions. The door flung open, Gudrun sprang from her seat behind her father and fled, coatless. Safety lay, if anywhere, across the snow-covered field. As she fled, the screams behind her arose to a heartrending crescendo, then rapidly grew fainter and fewer. She heard no more shots. This only served to spur her flashing feet.

East of Paris, France, 29 March 2007

Isabelle fled mindlessly, driving the family auto in a dream-state. Better said, she drove through a nightmare and dreamt of a time it might be over.

She had waited for a day or more, eyes fixed to the television, hoping to discover from the news some route of escape for herself and her boys. In that time two things had been made clear. The first was that the old line of fortresses to the east, the ones facing Germany and misdubbed the “Maginot Line,” were holding out well for the nonce, and butchering the invaders in the process. The second was that the French Army was holding open, however tenuously, an escape route from Paris to the east.

Sound carried poorly through the densely falling snow. Light was diffused. Nonetheless, so intense was the fighting some miles to either side of the road on which Isabelle drove that some must leak through.

Some even leaked through a brain gone on autopilot with terror. She kept her foot on the accelerator, moving as fast as snow and the traffic would permit.

Hammelburg, Germany, 29 March 2007

“Spur it, son, spur it,” whispered Brasche to the distant, unhearing, Schiffer.

Another Tiger, number 102, had gone down; first immobilized by an unlucky hit then pounded to scrap by the mass fire of nine C-Decs. Schiffer was bounding backwards with the remaining pair, himself holding stationary and firing at the dimly sensed enemy while the other Tiger moved back to reinforcement and relative safety, then switching over.

Brasche’s 1a, or operations officer, pointed out, “There is a ridge, between us and Number One Company, Herr Oberst. I was just thinking…”

Hans thought about it, looking at the tactical display, his mind measuring distances and interpolating times. “Yes. Yes, Major… it has possibilities.”

Thirteen had been Brasche’s unlucky number. His arms grown tired, he missed a kidney. The Vietminh had managed to call out to his comrades, once, before the crimson river spilled to the ground. Hans soon found himself running from a fusillade of ill-aimed shots.

The number of shots suggested to Hans that his pursuers numbered no more than twenty, the original number his squad of legionnaires had expected to ambush. A thought grew.

“Schiffer, how goes it?”

“Tight, Herr Oberst. The enemy presses us… but I have lost no more tanks.”

“Very good, Leutnant. Do you see the ridge about three kilometers behind you?”

“Yes, Herr Oberst. I was hoping to get a moment’s shelter behind it.”

Unseen, Brasche shook his head. “I want you to go right on past it and keep on going until I summon you. Do you understand?”

“No, sir,” answered Schiffer over the radio.

Brasche sighed audibly. “The problem, Leutnant, is that the enemy sensors outrange ours in the snow. But if you can entice them to follow you over to this side of the ridge the rest of the battalion can be waiting, within range of our sensors and sights. I doubt they will sense as well through solid rock as they can through diffuse frozen water. Nine Tiger IIIs, with an element of surprise, can handle that many of the enemy.”

“Ah, I see now, sir. How much time do you need to set up on your side of the ridge?”

The 1a answered aloud, “Five minutes, Herr Oberst, no more.”

“I heard that, sir,” announced Schiffer. “I will gain you that much time.”

Seeing that the 1a understood, Hans ordered, “Do it.” To Schiffer, via the radio, “Good lad. Five minutes.”

Amidst the shots fired at him, the fleeing Brasche kept up a running monologue, quite a loud one, in the practical language of the Legion of the times — German. Far too many Vietnamese for comfort spoke French.

Puff, puff… “Don’t answer”… Grunt, grunt… “They’re following me”… Pant, pant… “About twenty of them”… Wheeze… “Stand ready”… Gasp… “Let me through then let them have it when they’re in the kill zone.”… Groan… “I’m almost there… nicht schiessen.”[37]

With a heart pounding as much from fear as exertion, Hans jumped the first Viet corpse and then sprinted through the kill zone. From behind him came more shots and the chatter of furious, enraged Vietminh fighters. He thought about ducking to the side to rejoin his men but rejected the notion. The Viets had to have a reason to follow, and he thought only a fleeing man, one who had left a trail of throat-slashed corpses along the trail, would serve as reason enough in the jungle gloom.

Hans felt a sudden blow to his back. He never heard the shot that hit him. The shot spun him to the ground. The blow was painful enough, but then came the burning, a fiery agony that inflamed the entire path taken by the bullet. Hans moaned, “Shit, not again.” He closed his eyes from the pain.

When he opened them, the Viets had arrived. Precaution thrown to the winds, the little anatomies clustered about Hans. They all apparently wanted to plunge a bayonet into the monster who had hunted their comrades and slaughtered them like pigs.

Beginning to lose consciousness, Hans saw two of the Viets lift high their bayoneted rifles. He braced himself for the coming cold steel.

Giessen, Germany, 29 March 2007

The snow was cold, so cold, under her exhausted body. Gudrun’s heart beat within her like that of a trapped rabbit on the approach of the trapper. She had run her race… and she had lost. Now she awaited the pot.

And she was trapped, she knew. Though the horrid aliens behind her pursued in only desultory fashion, the other arm of the pinching Posleen impi was before her, stretching as far as the eye could see in the still falling snow. Even though the sound was snow-muffled, her ears told her that many more Posleen closed in beyond the range of her view.

Helpless and alone, afraid beyond terror, the girl began to weep softly. The sound of her quiet sobs attracted the attention of a Posleen normal. It approached.

“No… please no,” Gudrun pleaded. “Please? I have so many reasons to live. Don’t hurt me. Don’t eat me, please?”

The normal was unmoved. Nothing human could move it. Its needs were simple: food, work within its limited skill set, service to its God. At the moment the greatest need was food. Standing over Gudrun it drew and raised its boma blade.

The girl — innocent, bright, the “battle maiden” who would never hurt a soul — gave off a final scream. “Dieeeterrr!”

Hammelburg, Germany, 29 March 2007

“Steady, Schultz. Steady,” intoned Brasche. “Wait for it.”

Dieter merely nodded, so intently was his gaze fixed on his sight.

The radio sounded, “Schiffer to battalion.”

Hans took a second to review the tactical display. “Brasche here, Schiffer.”

“Sir, we are about to ascend the ridge.”

“I see that, Schiffer. We are waiting in the woods on the far side, about four kilometers back. Pass through us and hold up about two kilometers behind.”

“As you command, Herr Oberst. But it is not going to be easy.”

“I understand, son,” Brasche answered.

Brasche turned to his 1a. “Take command of the tank for a moment, Major. I am going topside. Krueger hold the engines steady; no acceleration at all.”

Not waiting for either the major’s or Krueger’s acknowledgment, Hans stepped to the elevator that led up to the commander’s hatch atop the turret. The elevator whisked him skyward quietly, opening the hatches automatically, as the 1a took over the command chair below.

Once in his perch high above the Tiger’s hull, Hans breathed better. Yes, the air down in the crew’s fighting compartment was clean enough. But a tank commander needs to see.

“To see and hear,” Brasche corrected himself, aloud, “not take some bloody glorified television screen’s word for things.” And hear he did. From the other side of the ridge came the sounds of Schiffer’s uneven fight with the landers, the sonic booms of incoming Posleen kinetic energy weapons, the crash of the Tiger’s mighty twelve-inchers, the faint rattle of treads and the steady whine of Posleen antigravity drives.

Then, there it was, the outline of the top of one of Number One company’s two remaining Tigers breaking the outline of the ridge. The tank crossed over and stopped just Brasche’s side of the topographical crest. It stopped to fire and the sheer shock of firing was like a dual slap to Brasche’s face.

He watched the turret turn, and then fire yet again. Hans assumed, from the lack of any antimatter or secondary explosion, that both shots were misses.

There was a sudden flurry of the Posleen’s weapons. On the far side, arising over the ridge, a dark and dirty cloud appeared, the cloud stretching a kilometer across. The hull down Tiger fired a single shot which was rewarded with a major flash and sound of detonation; a dead Posleen C-Dec.

Then came another flurry of kinetic energy projectiles incoming to the far side of the ridge. There was also another huge flash and grand bang. Brasche thought he saw, dimly through the snow, the monstrous bulk of a Tiger turret flying approximately straight up.

Filled with dread, Hans touched a switch on his headphones, “Schiffer, Brasche.”

“That was Leutnant Schiffer, Herr Oberst. Feldwebel Weinig speaking… commanding Third Platoon… correction, commanding Number One company… now.”

Brasche closed his eyes against the pain of losing such a fine young officer. Releasing a sigh of regret, he ordered, “Run for it, Weinig. Run for it now.”

“No quarrel with those orders, sir. Tiger 103, running fast.”

Three Tigers, sixty-nine of my men, lost irredeemably, fumed Brasche, a newfound hatred for his foe growing in his heart. He recognized the hate, recognized that he had felt it grow before — against Russians and Vietnamese and some few others. He recognized, too, that the hate was the steel his soul needed to do that which could brook no soft and tender feelings.

The cold steel, glowing faintly in the dim jungle light, never descended. From one side of the jungle trail into which he had led his Communist pursuers, Hans saw — and curiously did not really hear, to such a detached state had his wounding brought him — the yellow flowers of rifle and machine gun fire. The two Communists poised to end his life fell first, their bodies twisting and dancing under the hammering of the machine gun, their very dance of death given ghastly illumination by the flashing of the legionnaire weapons.

The firing kept up for a very long time, it seemed, causing Hans to wonder if a stray bullet of a friend and comrade might yet find him. Even in his pain he took the thought with amused detachment. He never even heard the blaring of the whistle that his assistant squad leader used to quell the fire and send the killer team out to search out the kill zone… and to make sure those bodies lying there were bodies in fact. It was legionnaire bayonets, not Communist ones, that bathed in crimson that night.

Unseen, the Tiger, Schiffer’s Tiger, burned hot and crimson beyond the crest of the ridge. The glow of the fire, a fire consuming fuel and munitions and men — causing the very steel of its armor to glow cherry red, made the lowest levels of the falling snow themselves to glow.

Three flashes, coming in rapid succession from a single point somewhere beyond view, lit the very edge of the crest in brief bursts of strobelike light.

“Wait for it,” cautioned Brasche when he saw Schultz tense suddenly.

“Right, Dieter,” piped in Harz, with a snickering tone to his voice. “Just like your little blonde girlfriend, we don’t want you firing too soon.”

The thought of Gudrun, waiting for him safe and warm in Giessen, brought a momentary smile and a wistful yearning. Harz’s guffaw ensured that the eagerness Schultz was certain shone from his features was followed quickly by a flush of embarrassment. “Fuck you, Harz,” the boy whispered softly, albeit not quite softly enough.

“Surely not me, Dieter. Did your Gudrun leave you so frustrated you’re already thinking about turning to boys?”

“Enough,” commanded Brasche in a voice that quelled all levity. “If anyone is getting fucked here, it is those lizards about to appear over the horizon.”

Giessen, Germany, 29 March 2007

Gudrun stared unblinking at the horizon. Nearby, a body was being rendered into easily portable ribs, chops and steaks. Loathe to waste any nutrient, the Posleen still had to let blood from the body spill to the snow covered ground. It contented itself, to a degree, with the instinctive understanding that even this would not be completely wasted; with the spring thaw and fall harvest the blood would bring forth finer crops from the enriched soil.

But a head full of rich brains? That was too much to waste. The Posleen doing the rendering ceased work. Then it picked up Gudrun’s pale, bloodless head by the bright blonde thatch. It neither noticed nor would have cared that a lock was missing. Once split open the disembodied head would make a fine feed.

Hammelburg, Germany, 29 March 2007

The head of the airborne Posleen phalanx crept cautiously over the horizon. It apparently sensed the fleeing Tiger 103, for it rapidly increased its speed to catch the prey. The rest, perhaps better said the remainder, of the original Posleen airmobile force, some seventeen C-Decs and Lampreys, likewise hastened to be in on the kill. Attention concentrated on the fast-moving Tiger they could easily sense, they never noticed the still, stationary, steady idling of the other nine Tigers.

“Feuer!” shouted Brasche into the general circuit, once he was sure all the Posleen had fallen into his trap. Nine twelve-inch guns crashed as one; piercing seven of the spacecraft and splitting them apart amidst blinding flashes of antimatter. “Fire at will.”

Eleven remained. Those eleven began spitting back their fire in the form of kinetic energy projectiles, plasma beams and high-velocity missiles. But here the advantage lay with the humans. By coming over the ridge, the Posleen had at least temporarily confined themselves to an area within the humans’ ability to sense and target.

And the Tigers’ heavy armor could take all but a very unlucky hit. The Posleen craft could not take any hit from those massive cannon.

A second volley rang out, almost as solidly as had the first — mass-produced precision machinery remained something of a German specialty, after all. Despite return fire and jinking to avoid being targeted, a further five Posleen targets were smashed and split. Six remained.

Used to having every advantage, from numbers to technology to sheep fighting heart, this was too much for the aliens. They attempted to make a run for it.

Seeing the enemy flee, a most heartwarming sight, Hans Brasche had but a single command, “Pursue.”

Giessen, Germany, 22 April 2007

Dieter Schultz had held out hope, even after the news of Giessen’s fall and the resulting massacre had come. But day after day passed with no news from his beloved Gudrun. Dieter began to believe that hope was forlorn.

Each new day had brought a new fight for the Korps and for the Schwere Panzer Battalion 501(Michael Wittmann). Each day brought new losses. The battalion dropped to eight Tigers, then seven. With each loss twenty-three valiant souls had flickered away in the wind.

Dieter the gunner had had the privilege of painting markings amounting to no fewer than eighty-eight kills — eight broad rings and eight narrow — on the barrel of Anna’s twelve-inch gun. With no word of Gudrun, the painting was a thankless, even an unhappy, task.

Briefly there was a respite as one new and two reclaimed Tigers joined the ranks. Then again the steady drain began, replacements never quite equaling losses. Brasche commanded a mere five tanks by the time the last infestation had been cleared from central Germany, said final infestation being the command of the senior God King, Fulungsteeriot, in and around the nearly scraped away ruins of the town of Giessen.

As briefly, Dieter Schultz felt a moment’s respite as the long-delayed field mail caught up with the often moving Tiger Battalion. The letter he received held something potentially grand for Dieter: a small wallet photo of Gudrun, looking much as she had the one night they had met; a short handwritten note, lightly scented; a small pack of golden, silken hair. He hoped with all his heart it was not a message from the grave.

Ouvrage du Hackenberg, Thierville, France, 23 April 2007

It was like a descent into the grave. From the spring just bursting forth into life above ground, from an open air scented with flowers, Isabelle and her sons entered through an arched concrete passageway into a dimly lit, damp, dank and malodorous sewer filled to overflowing with human refuse.

Isabelle’s spirits sank with each step into the fortress and down. To either side of her, arrayed on cramped cots pushed against damp walls, a mass of hopeless humanity stared at the newcomers with blank, disinterested faces. They seemed barely human in their indifference. Isabelle felt a chill run up her spine that had nothing to do with the cold, underground air.

Still, the cold was there. She remembered back to a worse cold.

The car had long since given up its ghost to lack of fuel. The reeling army had had fuel, of course, but had steadfastly refused to turn over so much as a liter to any of the begging, pleading refugees who had then to take to their feet. Isabelle had briefly thought of selling herself for some gasoline to save her boys. She had thought about it and then, realizing that younger women and girls could make better offers than she could, she had rejected the notion.

Instead, repacking down to true minimum essentials, the family had left the auto abandoned by the road and trudged the last few hundred kilometers afoot.

The cold had been terrible at first. There were moments when the shivering boys had made Isabelle think of ending it for them all then and there. Among the minimum essentials had been a pistol, after all. Though avidly in favor of gun control, as she was — being a liberal, and though, as a doctor, her husband had had a deep revulsion for weapons that harmed or could harm human bodies — yet still, humanly, they had kept her grandfather’s service pistol from the First World War, ignoring all calls for turn in.

But no, pistol or not, the maternal imperative had won out over mere misery. Her boys must live. To ensure this, she must live. The pistol remained unused.

Curiously, never once had it occurred to her, when it might still have done some good, that the pistol, more readily than her body, might have obtained a bit of fuel. More than once, trudging through the bitter cold, she had cursed herself for not thinking of that.

Berlin, Germany, 24 April 2007

The reprimand fresh in his hand, the Tir cursed the damnable and damned Germans with as much force as fear of lintatai would permit.

Cannot the Ghin see that these are no ordinary opponents? the Tir fretted. Well, I have one thing left to use.

To date the Tir had been very sparing as to which information, of that which he had received from Günter, he chose to download to the Net, in other words, to make available to the Posleen. Somehow, and the Tir did not understand the precise mechanism, he was being cut off from control. He feared, deep in his bones, that releasing all the information in one fell swoop would make the Germans — never among the least paranoid of humans — look to leaks that they might never otherwise have suspected.

But this was a desperate time. The Ghin was threatening to cut off bonuses, withdraw promised stock options, reduce salary… to drop the Tir’s rank to de’Tir.

The Tir shivered, as much with the threatened disgrace as loss of income.

He could leak the rest. It would cost him the use of Günter, of course. But then again, Günter had probably outlived his usefulness anyway.

It was considered, even among the Darhel, bad business practice to mistreat an asset, to reneg on a deal. Yet the only reward Günter had ever been promised had been the off-world evacuation of his family. No promise had even been made, indeed he had never asked, concerning moving himself to safety. The family was long since gone to a planet far from the path of the invaders.

So be it then, the Tir resolved. The Posleen will be given access to all the information I have. I just hope the idiots can make good use of it.

Giessen, Germany, 27 April 2007

From his thresh-built, gravelike shelter Fulungsteeriot cursed sibilantly. To fall so low, having come so high; this was the stuff of tragedy.

But there was nothing to be done for it; the enemy ring had grown tight around this little enclave of Posleen-hood. Information gathered from the Net told of an encircling ring of fire and steel, even now closing about the throats of the People. Already the wrecked outskirts of the ruined town were, for the most part, back in the possession of the natives. And the natives seemed curiously effective and eager to flush away the last of the Posleen. Why, it was almost as if they took things personally!

Three times Fulungsteeriot had sent his people against the ring of steel enchaining them. Not one breakout attempt had succeeded and the last attempt had not even reached the hated thresh before being broken to bits by their artillery.

Idly, the God King wondered if perhaps he should have saved some of the thresh that had been entrapped here. Perhaps, he mused, these might have been traded for safe passage. Incomprehensible, yet the thresh seemed curiously solicitous of their nestling-bearers and nestlings.

But the thought came far too late. In the first flush of victory what proper God King would think of eventual defeat, or would deny his people the fruits of their victories? Surely Fulungsteeriot was not one such. To the last little putrid nestling, the thresh of this town had been eaten. Not one, so the God King believed, had been allowed to escape.

Yet now, neither was there escape to space, not even for a senior God King like Fulungsteeriot. In their anger and hate the gray-clad thresh had not only surrounded this place, they had moved up more than sufficient of the fighting machines they called “Tigers” to prevent any vertical egress. Fulungsteeriot had tried that route, with lesser characters than himself. The radioactive ruins of not less than seven ships dotted the landscape, victims of the humans’ Tigers. There was no escape upward.

A realist to the end, Fulungsteeriot made no effort to create an illusion of hope, though he had one more breakout attempt planned, one involving all of his remaining people. Still, with a mass of thresh artillery pummeling his people into scraps of flesh and rags of skin, he knew he really had nothing to look forward to except the end.

A Kenstain approached the God King cautiously; there was danger in any of the people, even the normals, when they were in a fight for life. At a respectful distance, the Kenstain gave the Posleen equivalent of a cough, a sort of strained gagging sound.

“My lord? There is something you must see, something I just noticed floating amid the ether.”

“Yes? What?” asked the God King crossly.

“Just this, lord: of the threshkreen encircling us, one group is the remnant of that the People slaughtered near that place the humans called ‘Marburg.’ ”

Desperately, Dieter grasped hard onto the threads of his illusions. Yet scanning though his gunner’s sight across every spectrum, visible and invisible, and from one side of the Posleen-created desert to the next, merely served to crush whatever hope remained.

Stroking the shielded picture within his breast pocket as was his wont, Brasche’s heart went out to the boy, as did that of nearly every man of the crew.

“Why?” asked the boy. “Why?”

Krueger, who felt no sympathy at all, answered harshly from the driver’s station. “Because some pussy in uniform ran, boy. Read the after-action reviews; they are available on the Net. Because some little pansy took to his heels rather than face the danger, your little girl died. We don’t know who it was. We don’t know exactly where it began. But someone ran and started the panic.

“It was quite predictable, the way the pussy politicians shackled everyone’s hands but ours,” Krueger finished.

Schultz looked at towards Brasche’s command chair. Though he loathed his driver thoroughly, Brasche had to admit, “Yes, Dieter.”

“But what can one do?” asked Schultz, plaintively.

Krueger answered, “You kill ’em when they run, boy. Give ’em no choice but to stand and fight. Hang the cowards — low or high — and let ’em kick and dance some if you have time. Shoot ’em otherwise.” Krueger felt a little shiver of delight at an old memory — the kicking, jerking feet of a sixteen-year-old coward of a Volksgrenadier, cruelly suspended a mere foot or so above the ground, the noose placed behind the neck to make sure the boy could see how close salvation lay. The memory brought the same laugh Krueger had given off then, his joy in watching the coward’s futile struggle undiminished by time.

Brasche nodded, hating to agree with Krueger but knowing that Schultz needed the lesson. “It’s true, Dieter. The rot must be stopped as soon as it starts. Sometimes, if you train them right, the rot doesn’t start for along time; maybe not until the war is over. But when you have as much rabble in uniform as Germany today has, you don’t have much choice but to use harsh measures.”

Dieter took the lesson. “And if you do not, innocent and beautiful young girls die,” he said.

Giessen, Germany, 28 April 2007

Under the lash and crash of the thresh’s fearsome artillery concerto, Fulungsteeriot and his subordinate God Kings found it nearly impossible to drive their shattered oolt’pos into any semblance of a formation for the final break out attempt. In the end it proved impossible to create much of a formation. Worse, losses to what a thresh would have called the “chain of command” made it no easier to create a workable plan. Fulungsteeriot and his underlings found themselves feeding their oolt’os into the meat grinder with little direction beyond what a threshkreen might have called a “priority of effort.”

Chance, however, plays a great part in war. It was chance, to a degree, that the wretched remnants of the 33^rd Korps had been nearby, chance that Fulungsteeriot’s subordinate had found the information on the Net. Though three quarters of the dug-in circumvallation holding the Posleen in was held by good troops of the 47^th Panzer and 2^nd Mountain Korps, the area chosen for the “priority of effort” for the breakout was held in part by the defeated and demoralized remnants of the 33^rd Infantry Korps.

Well, they’d been in the general area and available…

“Brasche? Mühlenkampf.”

Brasche shook his head in a fairly vain attempt to clear the cobwebs. “Hier, Herr General.”

“Hans, the 33^rd Korps — fucking Pussy-Wehr! — is bolting again. You and your… let me see… five Tigers?…” Mühlenkampf waited.

Keying his throat mike an exhausted Brasche answered, “Yes, sir. Five Tigers left.”

“Proceed to sector Valkyrie Three. Jugend Division will follow. But Brasche, you will get there first. You must hold the ridge until Jugend arrives.”

“On the way, sir… Ummm… Herr General… what the fuck is going on? What am I to do?”

Mühlenkampf hesitated. Finally he answered, his voice tinged with sad determination, “Your duty, Herr Oberst.”

The remnants of the 33^rd Korps had not waited for the Posleen to arrive even within effective engagement range. At the first sign — sound, rather — of the approach of the teeming alien mass the Korps had taken to its heels.

Of course they had taken to their heels. These were the fleet-footed remnants, the early deciders, the least brave of all. Any good men, any good leaders? These were those most likely to have held on that fatal few seconds too long before, during the wretched rout at Marburg. In short, these were long since stuffed, in butchered parts, down alien gullets; and then, long since, deposited in malodorous lumps onto the soil thus soiled.

The good of the 33^rd Korps had become shit… while the shit had become a sort of human diarrhea. This loose shit ran.

With a pronounced crunching sound Anna slid over a long line of civilian vehicles that appeared to have met up with the world’s greatest mincing machine. Just past the line of chopped-up metallic scrap, with a deft twist, Krueger spun the Tiger Anna into a position on a military crest blocking the flight of the rump of the 33^rd Korps. Like clockwork the other four remaining Tigers took their own positions, two to either side along the same crest. Between them, the five heavies covered an area approximately eight kilometers across.

Krueger, more than any other member of the crew, was required by his duties to look carefully at the close ground. Just after the line of scrap had been an open field. The driver had seen that it contained scattered piles of bones, none with any flesh remaining to them. Briefly, his eyes saw and turned past a skull from which the top had been removed as neatly as might a coconut harvester have prepared a coconut for a quick drink. Krueger was unmoved by the skull.

Ahead were the signs of panic.

Krueger and Brasche, old veterans, had seen this type of panic before. Krueger cursed, “Useless fucking shits!” Brasche simply uttered a half whisper, “501^st Schwere Panzer? Stabsunteroffizier Schultz…”

From his gunner’s station Dieter peered through the sight for the main gun. In the distance he could make out portions of the Posleen mass, pouring from the nearly erased town. Nearer, appearing as individuals and in little knots, without order or discipline, Dieter saw the fleeing remnants on the ruined Korps. His unneeded left hand reached unconsciously for a folded envelope in his right breast pocket. Pulling it out, his fingers deftly opened the envelope and reached in to caress the human spun gold contained therein. A little bright spark of pure hatred burst into flame in the boy’s heart.

“… fire ahead of that mob. Use your coaxial Mausers. Let them know that they have run as far as they are going to. Draw a line in the earth,” finished Brasche.

“And if they won’t stop, Herr Oberst? If they cross that line?”

“Then the rot cannot be allowed to spread. You will kill them.”

Flame, a smaller flame than the Tiger’s usual cataclysmic belch, began to leap out. About two and a half kilometers ahead, just in front of the first of the routing grenadiers, a line of small, dark, angry clouds erupted at ground level.

To the fleeing sea of wit-robbed men of the 33^rd Korps the advent of the highly visible Tigers seemed like the opening of Heaven’s gates. Instinctively they turned towards the wide-spaced line of the remnants of the 501 ^st, each as if he were a boy fleeing a bully and racing to hide behind his mother’s skirts.

Each man of the mob — for that is what they were now — thought only safety, safety at the sight of the immovable mass of the Tigers. Each man was shocked quite speechless when that fortress-gate-of-security, mama’s proffered — milk laden — breast, began to pour fire into those foremost in flight.

Some of the fugitives assumed, indeed had to assume, such was the innocence of their childhood upbringing, such had been the kidskin gloves approach to their military training, that the Mauser light cannon fire devastating the knots of those closest to the Tigers could only be a mistake. That was their mistake… and the last many of them ever made.

Others, no less spoiled by mama’s teat and weakened military training, went into momentary shock, freezing in place.

Then they heard the voice, Brasche’s voice…

“Anna, give me external speakers,” ordered Brasche of the tank’s integral voice recognition speakers.

“Yes, Herr Oberst,” the tank’s AI responded.

“Order the other tanks to broadcast me as well.” Immediately, small hatches in each of Brasche’s five Tigers opened to permit the erection of three substantial loudspeakers each. Across a span of a dozen kilometers or more, Hans’ voice rang out clearly.

“Halt, you cowardly fucking bastards, or we’ll cut you down where you stand.”

Hans repeated that message twice more, then elaborated. “We are the 47^th Panzer Korps. That’s right you shits, the SS. Believe… believe in your hearts. We will kill you with no more thought then we’d give to shooting a dog. Your only chance to live is to fight with whatever you have in your hands to hold the enemy. The enemy you can still hurt… and we will help you in it. Us? You cannot scratch us and we will butcher you if you try… or if you run.”

Among the fugitive mass, some took the hint, reshouldered arms and began to fight back. Others, perhaps half or a bit more, just froze in panic. A few, however, judging that five widely spaced Tigers could not hope to cover every little bit of dead space, elected to try to exfiltrate through the low ground, or at least to seek a patch of cover which, while safe from the Posleen because of the Tigers’ fire, was also safe from the Tigers and the obvious madmen they contained. The largest number of the fugitives who so chose were those who had thrown away their weapons and could not see any point anymore in fighting, given they had nothing left to fight with.

Several thousand of these were successful in their quest… for a time.

“Gunner, eleven o’clock, canister, time fuse, Posleen mass!” ordered Brasche.

Dutifully the loader had a round of canister loaded.

Some would have preferred flechettes for the Tiger’s main gun antipersonnel round. It was indeed a very close call. What had decided the issue was, in essence, Teutonic thoroughness. Both were quite capable of killing Posleen. Packed in a twelve-inch shell both munitions could inundate a bit over a grid square, one square kilometer, with deadly hail.

Canister had won over flechettes because a 1.5-inch iron ball — traveling at moderate speed — would kill the Posleen quicker than even several hits by the lighter, faster, narrower flechettes. It was believed that if a Tiger needed to use antipersonnel ammunition in its main gun it would need the targeted Posleen to become “maus-todt” — dead in an instant.

For the first time since being encircled in this hellhole, Fulungsteeriot began to see some hope that the next instant would not see his body smeared and his life extinguished. Ahead, thresh fled. This he had not seen in many cycles.

Though his people had never been able to create, let alone disseminate, a plan, the wild hell-for-leather charge was possibly having a better effect than a coherent, logical plan might have. Certainly the threshkreen’s deadly artillery seemed to be having more than the usual degree of difficulty in adjusting their fire to destroy these more randomly appearing and disappearing targets. The very disorder and illogic of the enterprise seemed to be working in the People’s favor. There was hope.

Hope was short-lived. For some unknowable reason the fleeing thresh, most of them, halted and turned around. To the God King’s surprise many actually began to fight instead of flee.

And then Fulungsteeriot saw the most horrid sight in a life filled with horrid sights.

“Target!” answered Schultz.

“Fire!” ordered Brasche.

Oh, yes, Fulungsteeriot had seen as many as 100,000 of the People in dense-packed formation die in an instant. Yet that rare sight had only occurred with the use of the major weapons during orna’adar, the oft-repeated Posleen Ragnarok. There was thus little of carnage, little of blood, the sheer heat of the major weapons incinerating almost all traces. It was a waste of good food, of course — Fulungsteeriot had often though so. But it was clean and neat.

Not so this new weapon of the vile threshkreen.

A lesser propelling charge was used for the canister. Even though the weight of the total projectile was somewhat greater than that of the depleted uranium penetrators, not nearly as much velocity was needed or desired. The crew of Anna barely noticed the recoil.

Down range about 4.793 kilometers, at a spot Anna’s ballistic computer had judged ideal, a small burster charge detonated. Had the cargo of the shell casing been what is called “improved conventional munitions,” or ICM, this method of dispersal could never have been used; the very bursting charge would have destroyed the deadly, precious cargo. Canister, however, was inert iron — low-grade, low-cost, low-tech stuff. The detonation of two point five or so pounds of TNT barely disturbed its pieces, though aided by nine strips of linear shaped charge evenly and linearly spaced along the sides of the shell, it did manage to split the shell open.

The densely packed mass of four thousand large iron ball bearings began to split apart. Those most towards the earth at the time of detonation naturally impacted first. Had these balls been much smaller, or had they been moving much faster, they would likely have buried themselves harmlessly into the dirt. Flechettes certainly would have done so.

But at their speed and size these balls did no such thing. Instead, they bounced. Rather, they grazed, skipping over the earth in bounces of decreasing length. Few were wasted. Most managed to pass through one, two, even a dozen or more Posleen before coming to rest. So fierce was the damage inflicted on individual Posleen bodies that the harder pieces of those bodies themselves went down with fragments of their fellows, bones and teeth, imbedded roughly in soft, vital places.

And that was only the bottom four or five hundred of a cluster of four thousand!

The others came down at different times and different speeds. Yet all remained dangerous as they skipped and bounced, gleeful children of the gods of war, through the Posleen mass. Reptilian skulls were smashed, throats torn open, arm and legs roughly amputated. Many a Posleen found itself in possession of a large ball bearing inside its brutalized torso.

In all, the four thousand ball bearings, ricocheting and bouncing to the end, managed to graze over two point four million linear meters worth of death and destruction in an area only one square kilometer in scope.

The bleeding, sundered and torn Posleen horde shrieked as one in pain and despair and destruction.

Sitting atop his motionless tenar, Fulungsteeriot winced at the sound of agony multiplied to near infinity arising from the Posleen mass. The God King’s eyes swept over the scene with horror.

“What sins have the People committed that we should ever deserve this?” he asked of no one who could answer.

Where once a mass of nearly one hundred thousand had charged now only scraps remained. Fulunsteeriot saw one oolt, both forelegs amputated, circling unsteadily on shaking rear legs around the pivot of its too-weak centuroid arms. Others, a very few others, hobbled on three legs. Sometimes the lost leg still hung by a slender shred of muscle, dangling down uncontrolled and tangling the other limbs, the wrenching causing the victims to keen wildly and pitiably.

Many, perhaps as many as ten thousand, sought to stuff intestines back into torn frames. Sightless ones roamed with arms outstretched.

Worst of all to see, perhaps, were the three of four thousand of the unscratched. Once attacking proudly, borne up by the mass of their fellows, these for the most part now stood still, shuddering like the horses they somewhat resembled, when those horses, taken to the slaughter house, see their herds disappear before them in blood and horror.

Other muffled crumps and mass shrieks of agony told Fulungsteeriot that his attack had failed utterly. He snarled, set his teeth, flourished his crest. Fulungsteeriot might not have been the brightest of the Kessentai, but he was as courageous as any. He drove his tenar straight at the nearest of the enemy machines, seeking a warrior’s death.

Giessen, Germany, 1 May 2007

“Todt durch dem strang.” Death by the rope.

This was the verdict of the drumhead court-martial, issued en masse to two hundred thirty-seven of the two thousand three hundred and fifty-nine cowards who had sought shelter for themselves under the Tigers’ protective glare, while contributing nothing to the fight.

The Jugend Division had found them, passed them, and noted them for the next echelon, which arrested them. Then several days had followed wherein certain elements within the government had demanded the cowards’ release. Mühlenkampf had refused. Much to his surprise, the overwhelming bulk of the Bundeswehr had agreed with him, going so far as to refuse to obey any orders issuing from the Chancellery that might have led to such a release.

From the over two thousand, only ten percent had been chosen to expiate the sins of the rest.

“We can hang you all,” the court had announced. “And you all deserve it. Yet we find it expedient for the Fatherland if the deaths are more drawn out, and contribute more. Ten percent seems enough to remind the rest of your future duty.”

Guarded by representatives of both the 47^th Korps and the other, Bundeswehr, Korps which had done good service in the area, the procession of death formed three groups.

In the interior, nearest the mostly scoured town, closest to the largest concentrations of gnawed civilian bones, marched those condemned and about to be executed. Brasche had chosen Dieter Schultz to be the representative/guard from the 501^st for this group. Krueger had insisted that he also be included and, despising the man or not, out of deference to his service Brasche has sent the old SS man as well.

Just a few hundred meters further from the town, in line with those about to die slow deaths, equally guarded, marched the decimated rest of the condemned. These men’s death sentences were momentarily in abeyance, in the hope that more useful deaths might be found for them.

Furthest away were the rest, sightseers of a sort. Men who wanted to see men they despised die.

“Please, no,” begged a twenty-four-year-old unteroffizier as Krueger placed a loop of thin rope around his neck. “Please,” the doomed man repeated, “I have a wife and a small child. Please?”

“You should have thought not just of them, but of others like them you were abandoning, before you ran, you wart on a circumcised cock,” answered Krueger without heat, without any noticeable emotion at all, really. He motioned for the rope party to pull the rope taut, stretching it across the lamppost and forcing the condemned to mount the fifty-five-gallon drum before him.

“Make the rope fast,” demanded the sneering Krueger once the now openly weeping unteroffizier was mounted atop the drum. Instantly, the four men on the rope party complied. The free end of the rope was lashed to a fire hydrant the Posleen had decided to leave in place until they might understand it better. “Don’t leave the swine any slack, you crawling shits.”

“Schultz? Post!” Krueger ordered. Feeling awash in emotions he could but dimly understand, Dieter complied. They both ignored the unteroffizier’s wheezing, throat already constricted, “I have a family!”

Laying a, for once, comradely arm across young Schultz’s shoulder, Krueger began speaking in a most calm and reasonable tone.

“See this little weeping bastard shaking atop this drum, Stabsunteroffizier Schultz?” The question was plainly rhetorical and so Krueger continued without pause, without waiting for an answer. “He’s worried for himself, worried for his own family and circle of loved ones. He never gave a thought, not a single thought, to anyone outside that circle. You know that is true, don’t you, Schultz? That this piece of shit knows nothing of duty, of comradeship?”

That too, was rhetorical. Krueger plowed on, his every word a sneer made manifest. “He never cared for her… for a million others like her. He only cared for himself and his own. He neither cared nor imagined how your little honey might have shaken in fear before the aliens butchered and ate her.” Krueger emitted an evil laugh. “More than you ever got to do with her, isn’t it, boy? And it’s all the fault of this cowardly, trembling bastard and the others like him.”

Dieter himself trembled. Whether it was disgust at Krueger’s unwelcome touch, hate for the barrel-mounted piece of human filth in front of him, or the knowledge of his permanent loss, Schultz could not have said. But when Krueger removed his unwelcome arm and said, “Kick the barrel, Schultz,” Dieter didn’t hesitate.

The condemned gave a short, and quickly stifled, moan as Dieter’s leg came up, his foot resting on the barrel’s rim. It only took a little nudge before the barrel began to tip over on its own. Frantically — but futilely — the man’s feet scrambled to keep the barrel upright. It tipped over and rolled several feet, leaving the feet of the condemned to dance on air.

Dieter watched the man die from beginning to end. At first, before the rope had tightened much, one could hear labored, raspy breathing, interrupted by frequent pleas for mercy. The feet kicked continuously as the dying man sought salvation automatically. Dieter observed that each kick, each twist of the body, actually caused the rope to tighten. Soon the noose itself had moved far enough with the tightening loop to begin to cause great pain to the neck. For a brief time the feet kicked even more frantically, causing the rope to tighten further.

And then the air supply was fully cut off. Some quirk of physiology or of rope placement must have allowed blood, some portion of it anyway, to continue to flow to the brain. Dieter could see in the man’s bulging hideous eyes that he was conscious nearly to the last, conscious and in agony both physical and mental. The tongue swelled, turned color and thrust outward past the lips. The face turned blue… then black.

At length, the kicks grew fainter… and then ceased altogether. The dead man swayed in the light spring breeze, eyes focused on infinity. Dieter watched until the last spark of life had gone out. He felt…well, he couldn’t really say how he felt. But he also could not deny that he had no regret and no pity for the lifeless meat hanging before him.

He turned to Krueger and said, “Let’s finish the job then, shall we, Sergeant Major?”

And an SS man is born, thought Krueger.

Not far away, riding atop Anna’s turret, Hans Brasche watched the dispatching of the cowards with a certain detachment. He had seen it all before… so many times: a veritable orchard of hanged men, and not a few women — Russian, German, Czech, Baltic… Vietnamese. He was quite desensitized, really.

And had the Legion caught me, I too would have had my neck stretched, he mused.

As jungle wounds often will, so had Hans’ battle wounds festered. For many weeks after his evacuation his doctors at the French army hospital at Haiphong would not have given very good odds on his survival.

But the man had heart, had been young and in good health prior, and had a strong will to live. Gradually his body, aided by that marvel penicillin, had begun to triumph over the alien organisms infesting it. Health returned, and with it color. Soon he was nearly whole.

Nearly, however, is a far cry from being quite ready to return to the fetid jungle. The doctors insisted upon a longer period of recuperation than the French Army, less still the Legion Etrangere, would have really liked.

Hans didn’t mind though. He managed to enjoy quite a romp through Haiphong and Hanoi’s best brothels and bars. He was actually beginning to grow tired of the frolic when one day he stopped to read a French language newspaper at a quaint sidewalk café not far from Haiphong’s wharfs. It seemed that Israel, a Jewish state, had recently come into existence and was currently fighting for that very existence.

I wonder, thought the former SS officer, I wonder if there might be some expiation there…

Paying his tab, leaving a small tip and folding the newspaper, Hans headed for the wharf to enquire into departures.

There were other infestations, course. Yet the enemy was plainly on the defensive over a swath running from the old Maginot line (where the remnants of the French Army had used the hastily restored fortifications to stop the enemy cold, in the process saving several million French civilians who huddled within it and behind its “walls”) to the River Vistula (where German and Pole had fought like brothers together, as few would argue they should have fought together — almost seventy years earlier against the menace to the east).

And then one day a break was announced — a break and a day of thanksgiving, by no lesser personage than the Bundeskanzler himself. Germany was on the way to being saved, so he said, along with significant parts of France, Poland and the Sudetenland. That this was so, noted the chancellor, was due to the diligence of German workers, the intelligence of German scientists… and — first and foremost — the courage of German soldiers.

Of these, the Kanzler singled out two groups. The first of these was the research and development team now laboring on the Tiger III, Ausfürung B project. The second was the group which had, at one time or another, fought on every front. This group had been the rock against which Posleen assault had dashed in vain. This was the group that had shown fortitude amidst every defeat, courage despite every loss, determination over the worst odds.

This group was the Forty Seventh Panzer Korps. And to them, the Kanzler both gave and promised some signal honors.

The chancellor also had some interesting words to say concerning treason.

Berlin, Germany, 7 May 2007

I suppose it is for the best, thought the Tir. And I have never liked this cold, gray, ugly city, anyway. Less still their nasty language — an excuse for them to spit at each other under the guise of polite conversation.

But, he mentally sighed, I was so looking forward to the rewards of the job.

The message had come by special courier directly from the Ghin. The Berlin operation was to be shut down and all Darhel personnel withdrawn before the humans drew all the logical conclusions and came for them with implements of pain.

A week the Tir had, a mere seven cycles of this planet about its axis, to shut down his operations. Being a good businessman, in Darhel mode — which is to say honest in all that could be seen, dishonest in all else, the Tir had to evacuate his underlings and a select list of those that were important to them. That, as much as anything, would ensure the ruin of his plans for this miserable “Deutschland” place.

He was so sure that downloading the humans’ plans and dispositions to the Net would make the difference, would see these humans thrashed and… well… threshed. But it was all for naught. The plans had changed too quickly, even as he was having the information downloaded it had been becoming obsolete. Damn these quick-thinking omnivores. Damn especially those vile SS humans whom even their own side could not control or predict.

Why, WHY, WHY hadn’t these damned Germans been like the French? A logical people, in so many ways, the French. And their politicians were so vain and easy to manipulate through flattery and feeding their paranoia. Damn the Germans to the Hell of their superstitions.

Demotion, disgrace, reduction in salary, loss of bonuses and options… the Tir would have wept like a human if only he could have. He would be lucky not to be reduced to an entry level position.

Absently, his mind seething dangerously, the Tir used his inappropriate carnivore’s teeth to rend sticks of vegetable matter placed on a tray before him. The food never really satisfied, but he, like all Darhel, was forbidden the animal protein he, and they, craved. Lintatai was the result of eating the forbidden foods.

Boredom and disgust was the result of feeding on the permissible.