Watch on the Rhine

Epilogue: In a further future…

The Heavens twisted. Normal star patterns were distorted and covered as the battle cruiser Derflinger, leading the human fleet, began to emerge from hyperspace. Derflinger was followed by Kaiser and Kaiserin, the latest supermonitors Bismarck and, the heavy cruisers Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Scheer and Hipper. A parsec away materialized a similar fleet, containing Musashi and Yamato, Kongo, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu and Hiryu. In between, led by escorts, emerged the combined transport fleet.

Slowly and majestically, the three sub-fleets closed on their target, a major world of the hated Darhel. From below, semirobotic defenses attempted to hold the avenging humans at bay. These were semirobotic in the sense that they required a living operator to release them to fight, but fought on their own. Only this roundabout method saved the Darhel “operators” from lintatai, the catatonia and death that came from actively using violence.

Aboard the transport fleet’s flagship, a special vessel on loan from the Americans and named the “Chesty Puller,” the landing force’s chain of command met in the orders room. They met not so much to consult or plan or even to order as it was to share a few hours conviviality before the landing.

Shudders ran through this ship as it sent cargo after cargo of kinetic death down onto the Darhel world. In the viewing screen Mühlenkampf and his mixed corps of SS and samurai officers watched with satisfaction as bright lines of dozens of descending KE projectiles ended in actinic flashes before giving birth to clouds of angry black.

Initially a few ships seemed to try to make an escape. Shrieking useless admonitions that they were full of noncombatants, the ships attempted to run the human-imposed blockade. But centuries-old human laws of war held it perfectly legitimate to engage civilians trying to flee a siege. Nothing in those laws required that a siege be intended to have any long duration. The more numerous escort vessels saw to the would-be escapers, while the heavies continued pounding the planet’s surface.

Another happy shudder ran through the Chesty Puller. Smiling grimly, the shudder reminding him of his last session with a woman, Mühlenkampf lifted his glass in a silent toast, thinking, and aren’t we just giving you a good fucking, you elven pieces of shit?

The destruction being visited upon the Darhel initially looked carefully planned as one by one their planetary defense batteries were silenced. This actually took several hours to accomplish, hours enjoyably spent in sweet contemplation of revenge, present and future. Though the ship had rung with the occasional hit from the Darhel shore batteries, this too had ceased.

With the defense batteries suppressed, the fleet was able to turn its attention to population centers. LTG Horida, leading a corps of Armored Combat Suits in His Imperial Majesty’s Service, grunted satisfaction as one Darhel city after another was beaten to dust. Just so were our cities scathed… at your instigation, evil kamis… demons.

The slightest of smiles informed the face of Brigadier General Dieter Schultz. “Brigadier General” he was, for the SS retained the normal rank system of Western armies and had never gone back to the arcane rank system they had once used, an inheritance of the old Stürmabteilung, or SA. The double lightning flashes still glittered on his collar, though, as his silver armband proclaimed “Michael Wittmann.” Schultz would lead the heavy armor contingent in the conquest. He looked forward to testing his brigade of E-model Tigers against the Darhel’s half-baked pseudo-robots. He was eagerly certain his Tiger, Gudrun, would make short work of them.

By Dieter’s feet rested a combat helmet of a kind not seen anymore except on parade. That helmet never left his side. Never. The helmet was filled, apparently, with dirt, a few flowers growing from it.

After one particularly vivid strike, Harz, the Michael Wittmann Brigade’s sergeant major, clinked glasses with Toshiro Nagoya, Operations Officer for Horida. Benjamin, of Judas Maccabeus, thinking of his lost homeland, his slaughtered and scattered people, whispered, “An eye for an eye… blood for blood.”

A ship’s chime rang over the intercom. “Gentlemen, time,” announced a soft female voice. That was Admiral Yolanda Sanchez, the bloodthirsty Philippine bitch — as she was often referred to, in command of the Combined Fleet, ordering the men to their landing bays.

The revels broke up, officers and senior noncoms moving briskly to join their waiting men and combat vehicles. As each left he used his right hand to reverently tap a pseudo-glass casing containing a folded suede blanket, blonde and still bright after many centuries. Above the blanket, fixed to the wall, was a Posleen head, its face twisted in an agonized rictus.

Last to leave was Mühlenkampf. Still looking at the screen in the view of which a world and a civilization died, he mused softly, but as if the Darhel could hear, “The Aldenata — idiot children — thought they were doing one thing when they fiddled with the Posleen and ended up doing something very different. They were as wrong about their tampering with you Elves. But then, given both those lessons you still thought you were even more clever and that you could change us to suit your purposes. Now it is you getting a very different result from any you planned on.

“We, on the other hand, are going to change you and we will succeed. This is because our sights are set lower. We only wish to change you from living to extinct.

“I hope you are pleased with what you have created…”

Far, far away, many parsecs in fact, the ghost of Michael Wittmann, and many another, too, smiled in his bier.