Yellow Eyes lota-8

by John Ringo

  A great cry went up from the People massed about the pyramid’s base. Thousands of boma blades were drawn in salute, hundred of railguns brought to Present Arms.

  “Haiaiailll, Chief!” thundered the God Kings, hundreds of whom hovered in their tenar above the mass. The normals inarticulately snarled welcome and praise.

  Binastarion looked above the masses, to where even at this distance he could perceive columns of the People descending from the hills surrounding what had once been the major human town of the area.

  “Is it time, old companion?” he asked his Artificial Sentience.

  “Lord, it is not the best time. Too many Kessentai ride their own feet rather than tenar. Not all the normals have even shotguns. That said, and despite whatever these humans could do; moreover, despite much sun and rain and a fertile land, the People have grown quickly. Nestlingcide has done little to help. Incidents among the normals are up. They hunger.”

  Deeply, solemnly, the God King nodded. “Sound amplification,” he ordered his Artificial Sentience.

  Binastarion reached around to place his own grasping member on the heavy metal hilt of his own, hereditary, boma blade. This his drew, the scraping sound echoing across the masses. His People shouted and thundered his acclaim from below.

  “We march!” the God King said.

  San Pedro Line, Republic of Panama

  The first sign came well before dawn, a glowing line drawn in the sky above the Inter-American Highway. The glow spread outward to become a fan the nearer it came to the edge of human resistance to the Posleen infestation. To the human soldiers, watching and waiting in their trenches and armored vehicles, the glowing fan spreading above them seemed like the warning that the gates of Hell had broken loose and a swarm of Satan’s own were coming to drag their souls down to damnation.

  The defenders weren’t very far wrong either.

  To Sergeant Quijana, standing in a trench line two hundred meters east of the river, it wasn’t the glow that frightened. Indeed, that was all to the good as it would give his men clearer targets, presupposing the light lasted until dawn and — as seemed likely — the enemy showed up before then.

  No, the glow was good. What bothered Quijana, and apparently most of his men, was the sound. Even at this distance the sound struck at the soul: the whine of the aliens’ massed tenar, the clatter of their claws on the hard surface of the highway, their growls and snarls, even the sound of branches of trees breaking as the Posleen horde forced its way through woods — and all the sound, all the time, growing…

  Quijana shivered. He sensed his men doing the same. God, I feel so alone.

  From overhead came the freight train rumble of a few score shells being lobbed in the enemy’s direction. For a moment, the flight of the shells downed out the Posleen cacophony. Moreover, when the shells — 122mm Russians, Quijana thought — impacted, the flash of their explosions, sensed even in the distance, briefly overwhelmed the glow in the sky. Somehow, the sergeant felt instantly better. He looked around at the soldiers lining the trench with him, and saw that they, too, had relaxed — if only a bit — once they’d heard the screaming friendly shells.

  Hmmm. If the aliens’ noise frightens me and the men, and our own calms us…

  Announcing, “I’ll be back in a few minutes, Boys. I need to call the commander,” Quijana turned and scrambled up a few steps cut into the back of the main trench, then followed a narrower one to where his own squad’s BMP awaited in a hull-down fighting position. He placed one foot on the track of the vehicle and hoisted himself halfway up.

  “Hand me your helmet,” the sergeant ordered a corporal standing in the hatch of the BMP. When he had the helmet on his head, Quijana made a call to his platoon leader.

  “Sir, I think we ought to start our engines.”

  “Why, Sergeant?” the lieutenant queried back.

  “I think it will have a good effect on the men, sir.”

  “Wait, out.”

  The lieutenant never answered. Instead, after a couple of minutes and from about five hundred meters back, the sergeant heard one heavy duty engine, and then another, rumble into life. He handed the helmet back to the BMP’s track commander. In few minutes more his own track gave off a roar as the driver started it, as did the BMPs to either side.

  As Quijana reached his dismounted squad, back in the trench, the entire San Pedro Line had come to life, better than one thousand heavy and medium armored vehicles, growling their defiance and making the ground for thirty miles shake. More artillery in the rear — mortars, too, now — began to speak. The landscape lit up, to the front from the bursting shells, to the rear with the muzzle flashes of hundreds of heavy guns. The sound of the Posleen horde was lost amidst the roar.

  Confidently, more confidently than he had felt since spotting the first sign of the approaching enemy drawn in the sky, Quijana said to his squad, “Boys, we’re just gonna murder the bastards.”

  From somewhere off to the left flank came the call, repeated from point to point, “Here they cooommme!”

  Posleen normals were stupid, even moronic, but they could be taught if one used the right tools. When the first wave of the first scout oolt hit the leading edge of a minefield the dismounted junior God King in command and a dozen of his people tripped off an even half dozen Bouncing Betty mines. The Kessentai went down, eviscerated and screaming in agony as did over a score of the normals. Seeing legs blown off, flesh oozing yellow blood where ball bearings had imbedded themselves, and entrails draping the ground and entangling such limbs as remained, the bulk of that scout oolt stopped, frozen in their tracks.

  Two BMP gunners, seeing the freeze, had the same thought at the same time. Within seconds, and milliseconds of each other, two 100mm high explosive antipersonnel rounds went off above the oolt. The rounds were auto-loaded and detonated by a laser beam range finder precisely above the spot picked by the gunners. (Where the United States had made a 25mm rifleman’s grenade launcher to do the same thing, the Russians had never thought the effect of such a grenade justified the expense. A 100mm shell, on the other hand, did.)

  Packed as they were, without a God King for leadership, with shrieking almost-corpses rolling on the blood-stained ground ahead of them, clear space behind, and with two large shells exploding overhead, the normals of the scout oolt broke.

  Quijana’s company’s first sergeant, El Primero, risked a look over the lip of the trench, saw the enemy running and did a quick count. “Hmmm. With sixty of the bastards down, that leaves only about five-million, nine-hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine-hundred and forty to go.”

  The primero shrugged, “Piece o’ cake.” Then he lowered his head, and walked on down the trench.

  The trench was camouflaged and each of the men had several obliquely oriented firing positions from it, dug into the western wall. Quijana walked along the duckboarded floor, stopping at each man to pass a few words of encouragement, check on ammunition, or ensure they were drinking water as they ought. Spent ammunition casings, steel with a brass wash for the most part, littered and smoked on the duckboards. Idly, Quijana brushed some of them aside with his boot to let them fall through the spaces in the flooring. Some of the freshly fired casings made a slight, almost imperceptible hiss as they hit the mud under the duckboards.

  The enemy were still coming and the riflemen and machine gunners were still killing those who managed to make it through the thick minefield. The BMPs were donating shells at any cohesive looking groups that seemed about to make it past the mines or which were held up by the wire to the front. The air above was thick with lightning-fast railgun fleshettes.

  Quijana reached an arm up to tap a shoulder. “Let me up there, Gonzo,” he told a scared looking, sixteen-year-old private named, appropriately enough, Gonzalez. The young private sighed audibly, then withdrew his long rifle — one of countless thousands of Dragunovs purchased from Russia to give the defenders extra reach and a heavier bullet — and stepped down into the greater safe
ty of the main trench.

  Carefully, Quijana’s face searched out the young soldier’s face. Scared; but then who wouldn’t be? Briefly, he reviewed what he knew about the kid. Gonzalez, Angel F., sixteen, drafted six months ago. Father and mother live in the City. Some brothers and sisters, all younger. Good kid; did well in training.

  “You’re doing fine, Gonzo,” Quijana said as he slapped the kid’s shoulder. Then, to emphasize that the danger wasn’t that great, Quijana himself took Gonzalez’s previous position and — keeping as much of his head under cover as possible — looked out over the battlefield.

  The first and most noticeable things Quijana saw were eight — no nine, one was crashed and smoking amidst a pile of Posleen bodies — tenar. He ducked down again and looked behind him. The trench was competently laid out, which is to say that the rear berm was higher than the front, or firing, berm to prevent the heads of the defenders from being silhouetted against the sky. Still, he saw about as many smoke trails from his own side’s armor as he had seen tenar crashed or hovering lifeless.

  Oh, well; sometimes you get the abat and sometimes the abat get you. He wasn’t sure where he had heard that first, perhaps it was from one of the gringo or Russian trainers who had helped run one or another of the courses he had taken.

  More worrisome than the smoke columns from behind, Quijana’s next look showed the ground carpeted with Posleen bodies. Ordinarily, this would be a happy sight. On the other hand, If there are any mines under those bodies still left they sure won’t go off now.

  Worst of all was the wire. This was laid out normally: protective wire forty or fifty meters to the front, tactical wire past that to guide the enemy into preplanned kill zones and final protective lines, and supplementary wire to fool them as to which was the tactical. (For the serious downside to tactical wire was that it almost always led, inexorably, to a machine gun or other crew-served weapon sited to fire along it down the enemy side.)

  The wire had been well strung and constructed, and competently laid out. Unfortunately, if one threw enough railgun rounds at it some of them had to connect. And even a gram’s worth of metal, moving at an appreciable fraction of c, would be enough to sever the wire. Quijana wasn’t even sure the Posleen were doing it deliberately, but great swaths of the wire were severed and down even so. Moreover, in places the Posleen had stacked their wounded and dead so thick and deep that the wire had become more of a frame for holding up a Posleen-paved aerial pathway.

  “Can’t be too long now,” Quijana commented to himself as he stepped down to the floor of the trench.

  “Sergeant?” Gonzalez queried.

  “Huh? Oh. It can’t be too long before we get the word to pull back, Gonzo. We’re not supposed to hold this line indefinitely, you know.”

  “Oh. Whew. I thought you meant something else entirely.” The private looked visibly relieved.

  “No,” Quijana laughed. “Not that; we’ll be fine. Now back to your post, soldier,” the sergeant ordered.

  As Gonzo mounted the step back to his firing position, Quijana turned away to continue his walk down his short section of trench. The sergeant then heard a heavy thwunk behind him. He turned instantly and began to shout, “Med…”

  The shout died, stillborn. There was nothing a medic could do for a private missing his head. Quijana fought down the urge to vomit at the finely sprayed blood and chunks of skull and brains dotting the back wall of the trench.

  Damn. The kid was only sixteen years old. For the moment, Quijana took over Gonzalez’s position on the firing step. I hope to hell the word comes to pull back soon, even though I know the retreat will be a nightmare.

  CA-134, USS Des Moines, off Isla Cebaco

  CIC was a little metal pillbox containing barely suppressed excitement and fear. McNair could smell the emotions, sour and bitter, on the recycled air. The whole ship reeked of it in a way it never had before, for on the first deadly mission of this war the crew had been ignorant. On the other runs to raid the Posleen-held coast it had felt safe in the darkness. This fight saw the men of the ship wise in bitter ways and, however determined to do their duty, frightened of what that duty was likely to entail.

  The exec looked up as the ship’s captain entered. “We just got the word, Skipper. The Heavy Corps, First and Sixth Panamanian Mechanized Divisions, are going to start pulling back in half an hour. We need to help them break contact. I’ve already given the order to commence the firing run while Salem and the land-based air defense provide cover.”

  McNair looked over at Fire Direction.

  “Skipper, we will be in range of Target Group Alpha in,” the FDO consulted the chronometer above his plotting table, “seven minutes and… thirty seconds.”

  The captain nodded, said, “Well done,” and turned to Daisy’s avatar, already present. “You ready, my girl?”

  “Willing and able, Skipper. We’re gonna murder the bastards… for Julio, among others.”

  Lastly, McNair ordered the ship’s public address system turned on. Then he turned to Father Dwyer and asked, “How do we stand with the Almighty, Chaplain?”

  Dwyer smiled a wicked smile, all bared human incisors and fangs, and spoke loudly enough for the PA set to pick up his words. “With regard to the enemy, Captain, the good Lord says, ‘I will leave your flesh on the mountains, and fill the valleys with your carcasses. I will water the land with what flows from you, and the river beds shall be filled with your blood. When I snuff you out I will cover the heavens, and all the stars will darken.’ Ezekiel 32; verses five through seven.”

  “So be it,” McNair agreed, then ordered, “Marine marksmen and Panamanian Cazadores topside. Prepare to repel boarders.”

  San Pedro Line, Republic of Panama

  “Wait for it, boys, wait for it,” Quijana cautioned his squad. Only two men — exceptional shots, the both — still manned their firing steps in the trench. The rest clustered around their squad leader near the back step that led to the narrow communication trench that, in turn, led to their BMP.

  “What’s it like, Sarge, when a ship fires?”

  Quijana and one other man, his corporal assistant, were the only men in the squad who had survived the near destruction of 1st Division when the Posleen had come pouring out of the hills and valleys to surround them during the early stages of the invasion. He knew what the guns were like.

  “Fucking scary, Soldier,” the sergeant replied. “Also fucking beautiful and wonderful… like manna from Heaven or God’s own lightning when you need them. But keep your heads down, anyway, because God’s manna didn’t have a deadly radius of hundreds of meters and He had better quality control at the lightning factory.”

  “What about Gonzo?” one of the other privates asked. “We going to just leave him for the Posleen to eat? Seems… wrong.”

  Quijana thought about that. “You’re right, Private. It is fucking wrong. Tell you what; go to the BMP and get me a Bouncing Betty and an extra four or five pounds of C-4, also some det cord and a nonelectric cap. We’ll rig Gonzo so he can get a few more and leave nothing behind for the aliens to eat. Go, son.”

  The private took off at an awkward run down the communication trench. By the time he returned, Quijana and his corporal had dug a small hole for the mine and prepared Gonzalez’s body, removing his bloodied combat gear and shirt. The detonating cord they formed lumps of C-4 plastic explosive around, then further wrapped it around the corpse. One end of the det cord they also wrapped around the mine. The mine itself went into the hole, with its safety pin still in place but the retaining bends straightened. The squad put Gonzalez’s shirt back on him and gently eased his headless body down onto the mine’s three detonating prongs.

  Quijana patted the corpse’s shoulder, then slid one hand under the body until he was able to grasp hold with a finger and thumb on the ring of the safety pin. Silently praying — mistakes did happen, after all — the sergeant eased the safety pin out of the mine’s fuse and from under the body, then deposited it
in his right breast pocket.

  Breathing a sigh of relief, Quijana whispered, “Get some, Gonzo. Get some.”

  “Sergeant! I think the ship’s firing.”

  CA-134, USS Des Moines, off Isla Cebaco

  The bow below cut through the water, churning it to a furious white froth as twelve Daisies above, each perfectly identical to the others, stood holding holographic candles around Father Dwyer.

  The priest intoned, “Wherefore in the name of God the All-powerful, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, of the Blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and of all the saints, in virtue of the power which has been given us of binding and loosing in Heaven and on Earth, we curse the Posleen themselves and all their accomplices and all their abettors. We order them gone; we exclude them from the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church in Heaven and on Earth; we declare them anathematized and we judge them condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels and all the reprobate. We deliver them to Satan to mortify their bodies, now and after the Day of Judgment.”

  The twelve Daisies — six to either side of the priest, lining the bow, and wearing something like vestments — intoned, “Fiat. Fiat. Fiat,” and then cast their virtual candles over the side.

  “It is done,” the priest said.

  The twelve Daisies immediately shrank to one, standing at the chaplain’s left shoulder. “Father,” she whispered, “I know the ceremony as well as you do. That wasn’t quite right.”

  “Yes, Daisy,” the priest answered. “I had to modify a bit. No matter, His Holiness will understand and God will know His own… and so will Satan.”

  The single avatar remaining shrugged. “As you say, Father. But, while God and Satan may know their own, my guns won’t give a shit and the captain is about to give the order to fire. Go below, please.”