Yellow Eyes-ARC

by John Ringo

  "And then we made a mistake . . ."

  Chapter 18

  There are no bad regiments;

  there are only bad officers.

  —Field Marshall,

  Viscount William Slim

  Remedios, Chiriqui, Republic of Panama

  Suarez wasn't confused; he was infuriated. The orders emanating from Cortez's headquarters were confusing, to be sure. "Go here . . . no, wait . . . no, go there . . . no, come back . . . no, go forward . . . detach a battalion to secure X . . . no, no, concentrate to attack Y." But Suarez, rather than being confused, understood completely.

  The fucking moron is simply too scared shitless to have a coherent thought.

  Right now Suarez's mechanized regiment was about half scattered around the northern part of the Province of Herrera and the western portion of Veraguas. He had radio communication with most of them, most of the time, but the communication was unreliable at best. Entire battalions would be unreachable for anywhere from minutes to hours. Even in a place that screwed with radio communication naturally, Suarez thought that more than a little suspicious.

  As the lead regiment of the division, Suarez had, or was supposed to have, operational control of the company of Yankee ACS attached to the 1st Division. Unfortunately, Cortez interfered, or attempted to interfere, with the gringos even more than he did with his own force. Fortunately, the gringos, like Suarez himself, had learned very quickly to ignore most of what the division commander had to say.

  Even more fortunately, the commander of the ACS, the gringo captain named Connors, had an understanding with Suarez. It was the understanding of two soldiers, differing greatly in rank, who recognized a common bond of dedication to the profession and a common bond in being placed under the command of idiots often enough for it to be more usual than not.

  "This is not the way to use an armored combat suit formation," Connors complained to Suarez. "Little penny packets, scattered about, with no oomph and no punch. We should be like armor, concentrated for the decisive blow. Except that we're better than armor because we can go anywhere and fight anywhere. We should not be used like assault guns, supporting slower moving and less powerful forces. It's a violation of Principle of War—mass."

  "You're pulling in your detachments?" Suarez queried.

  "Yes, sir," Connors agreed, nodding unseen inside his suit. "As I can."

  "Well, Captain, while I agree with your assessment of the role of ACS, we've got another problem that might make it a little wiser to do some splitting up. How are your internal communications?"

  "Good, sir. We're not having the commo problems your forces are."

  Connors reached up with both hands and removed his suit's helmet, placing it under one suited arm. Silvery goop retreated from his head and hair, forming an icicle on his chin. The goop reached out a tendril seeking the helmet. When it had found it, it flowed from the chin straight down. As before, Suarez found the image and, worse, the image of what it must be like when in the helmet and surrounded by goop, to be most unsettling.

  Suarez shook his head to clear the thought. Blech.

  "I think our commo problems are not natural, Captain, even though they seem to be random. Instead, I think someone is . . . feeling us out, getting a picture of how we work. Maybe it would be better to say that they've already done that and have now graduated to the early stage of deliberately fucking with us."

  Connors' mouth formed a moue. He was a veteran of the early fights. He knew that someone or something often targeted human communications. He was also pretty sure that those doing the targeting were not stupid crocodilian centauroids.

  "They'll blanket you at the worst possible time," Connors announced. "I've seen it before."

  "I agree," said Suarez. "Which is why I am going to ask you to do something very tactically unsound."

  "You want me to leave a man or two with each of your battalions for backup communications, don't you, sir?"

  Suarez smiled. "Pretty sharp for a gringo, aren't you?"

  "There's something else too, Colonel," Connors began. "I have a really bad feeling. We aren't killing enough Posleen to make a difference. They're fighting, and running, and fighting, and running. Almost like humans would. It's unsettling, sir, you know?"

  Taking a deep breath and exhaling, Suarez agreed. "Scares me too, son. And I don't know what to do about it. The division commander's no help. . . ."

  "Well, sir, I have an idea. If I break up one squad for backup communications I still have two squads from one platoon I'll have shorted. I'd like to send them out as flankers, north and south, in buddy teams. That'll still leave me two line platoons and a weapons platoon under my control for when thing go totally to shit."

  "Do it," Suarez ordered. "Do you need any backup from my regiment?"

  Connors hesitated, thinking about that. After a few moments he answered, "No, sir. If I were you I'd start pulling in my troops and at least getting ready to form a perimeter. If my guess is right then the best thing you can do for my flankers is give them a solid place to run to. 'Cause, sir, sure as God didn't make little green apples, we've got our dicks in the garbage disposal and someone, or some thing, has his finger on the power switch."

  Darhel Consulate, Panama City, Panama

  The Rinn Fain's clawed finger rested lightly on the blinking green button. He contemplated that claw. What a sad state. We were a warrior people; a people of fierce pride. A people made by evolution to be naturally what the divine intended us to be. And then the never-sufficiently-to-be-damned Aldenata had to meddle, reducing us to meddlers ourselves. The Rinn Fain nearly wept with the sadness of the fate inflicted by the Aldenata on his people. Damn them, and damn those earlier Darhel who acquiesced.

  "All is in readiness, my lord," the slave Indowy prodded. "It will be perfection, now. If you hesitate, the humans may be prepared to counter."

  Smiling through needle sharp teeth at the slave, the Rinn Fain answered, "I am not hesitating, insect. I am savoring the moment. So much perfect destruction to be unleashed, and no violence inherent in it to trigger lintatai. Moments like this are rare, wretch, and must be appreciated to the fullest."

  Even so, the Rinn Fain pressed the button, which went from blinking green to solid red.

  North of Remedios, Chiriqui, Republic of Panama

  In theory an ACS could simply beat its way through the rain forest, hardly slowing even for the largest trees. In practice, not only did the felled trees tend to build up to the point where they became nearly impenetrable even for one of the suits, the noise had a nasty tendency to attract the attention of ill-mannered strangers.

  Thus, Corporal Finnegan and Private Chin wove their way through the trees as quietly as the suits would permit. This took time in the short run, and delayed any information their two-man recon team might uncover. On the other hand, dead troopers relayed no information at all, beyond the sheer fact of their deaths, recorded in blinking black on their squad leader's heads up display.

  "This is bullshit, Corporal, purest bullshit," observed Chin, never the least outspoken of the squad's privates, possibly because, out of his suit, he was the shortest of the lot.

  "You're bitching just for the sake of bitching. Shut up, Private," answered Finnegan succinctly.

  Chin was not, however, considered the loudest mouth of the squad without reason. He continued his bitching, more quietly but nonstop, right up until popping his head over a ridge overlooking a small, river-fed valley below.

  "Stupid fucking bullshit, is what it is. Why I ever joined this outfit—"

  "Chin? What's wrong, Chin?" asked Finnegan.

  For a worrisome moment, the private said nothing. When he did it was simply to say, in stunned surprise, "Corporal, you need to see this."

  Railing softly about pain in the ass rankers, Finnegan bounded over, weaving around the trees, until he stood beside the private, his head too sticking just over the rise.

  "Oh, shit," the corporal said quietly.

  In t
he valley below, thousands upon thousands of them, so thick that Finnegan couldn't even see the ground, the Posleen host was rising to its feet, the tenar-riding God Kings pointing and gesturing to the pair of ACS troopers.

  Even as the first railgun rounds began to chew the ground and trees around them, Finnegan ordered, "RUNNN!"

  Remedios, Chiriqui, Republic of Panama

  Connors went instantly white, no mean feat given the amount of sunbathing he had done in the months before the Posleen landed. He didn't have to inform Suarez what Finnegan and Chin had found. The suit's communicator squawked loudly enough for the colonel to hear for himself.

  "Posleen . . . zillions of 'em . . . in the valley at Objective Robin . . . we're running . . . they're pursuing . . . shit! Chin's down."

  Another voice: "It ain't just Finnegan, Boss. We got us about forty thousand of the bastards at Objective Tiger."

  Another voice: "Can't run, Cap'n Connors. We're pinned. I can't tell you how many. More'n . . . aiiiii!"

  Another voice . . . another voice . . . another voice.

  Connors looked up at Suarez, standing in the hatch of his track. You're the chief, Colonel. What the fuck are we gonna do?

  In response Suarez held up his radio's microphone; nothing but static and occasional broken up syllables.

  "I can rebroadcast," Connors offered.

  "Can you fit inside the track so I can show you on the map?" Suarez asked.

  "Not necessary, sir," answered Connors as his AID enhanced suit again projected a map between them. "All my people can see the same image."

  "They can all see it? Nice. Okay, Captain, we've got no normal commo so everything is going to go from me, through your suit, to your people and then to mine. This is what I want."

  Suarez finger began to trace out a circle into which his half scattered battalions would fall and hold . . . or in which they would die. If asked, Suarez would have bet on "die."

  "Oh, God, I don't want to die!" was Cortez first voiced thought as he saw the wave of centaurs cresting the high ground to the north. It was fortunate that his radio, like everyone else's, couldn't send or receive. The only thing holding the 1st Division's cohesion together at all was the fact that none of his subordinates could hear their commander.

  A nearby light tank company, Cortez's personal escort, turned into the coming storm, flailing away with machine guns and canister. For an all too brief moment it looked like they might hold. And then railgun fire began to chew through the thin Chinese-built armor. By ones and twos the tanks began to brew up as their crews were cut to ribbons and railgun fleshettes set alight their on-board ammunition and fuel.

  "Turn around! Turn around!" Cortez shrieked at his driver.

  The driver obeyed, pivot steering the Type-63 one hundred and eighty degrees to the south, then gunning the engine to race away, trailing a cloud of thick, nasty diesel smoke behind.

  Cortez's eyes remained fixed to the north where the Posleen wave lapped over a mixed column of trucks and artillery. The gunners, he saw, were struggling to free their guns and fire even as the wave swept over them and cut them down.

  A medical unit, two thirds female as Cortez could well see, was the next to go under. The men of the unit attempted to make a stand to cover the retreat of the women. Without machine guns, or even more than a few rifles, the men went under quickly. The Posleen then pursued the women, chopping the poor screaming wretches down from behind and then stopping to butcher their bodies and feast before continuing the pursuit.

  Cortez felt nothing at that, despite having used his position more than once to bed some of the women of that unit. They had been, after all, just office and peasant girls, not women of class and breeding; not anyone who mattered.

  A man would have turned and died then, to protect the women. Cortez simply urged his driver to move faster.

  * * *

  Julio Diaz cursed that his glider could not move any faster. On only his second actual combat mission Diaz already had begun to feel like a war-weary veteran. One thing was different about this mission from the previous day's; his radio worked perfectly.

  And everyone else's was in electronic bedlam; those, anyway, that Diaz could not see stretched out, butchered and lifeless, below. They were hard to see, too, because Panama's normally emerald grass was tinted red across half a kilometer to either side of the Inter-American highway.

  This was awful beyond words, even awful beyond thought; fifteen or twenty thousand of his countrymen, and women, massacred, rendered and eaten. Clusters of Posleen, some of them numbering in the thousands, walked among the dead, hewing a head here, splitting a femur there. Crossing himself, Julio thanked the Almighty, above, that the aliens continued to ignore him.

  God did not or would not save him from everything. Despite having an empty stomach from once again, embarrassingly, having to vomit during his launch, Diaz needed to puke again. Only the fact that he was above the smell of slaughter saved him from that.

  Still cruising while slowly sinking, without units to spot for, Diaz didn't even think to call for support from the cruiser that had blessedly answered him the day before. Sure, he could have killed Posleen, and that might have satisfied his urge for revenge. But revenge was a thin soup, faced with the enormity of the slaughter.

  Despite the barren feeling of hopelessness, Diaz continued to fly westward. When he returned to base, if he returned, his father would need to know the extent of the disaster.

  To his right the sun was sinking. Even as it sank, Cortez's hopes began to rise. His tank was amphibious. With any luck he would soon reach the sea and could set out on that, safely towards home.

  With all the fearful paranoia of a hunted fox, Cortez had guided his tank and crew from the scenes of slaughter. Several times, when the pounding of alien claws on the earth had warned him of an approaching horde, he had ordered his tank into low ground, dense Kunai grass or copses of thick standing trees. His luck had held. While groups of refugees and even the occasional fragment of a cohesive unit had fallen all around him, the aliens had never noticed or, if noticing, cared enough to actually seek him out. He supposed they must have had enough to eat.

  While opening his own bag of gringo-supplied combat rations, Cortez began to contemplate the future. He was facing a court-martial, he knew. Last time he had deserted a command, in 1989, he had been fortunate that his government had followed its army into extinction quickly. This time he could not hope for such a boon. His government and army would survive this debacle long enough for him to see the inside of a courtroom and the pockmarked wall before the firing squad. His uncle, the president, would clearly toss him to the wolves.

  Worse, his driver, loader and gunner would be the star witnesses at his court-martial. They had the defense of superior orders, at least. He had only his own will to live, no matter what.

  Can I count on Uncle Guillermo to quash any charges? Only two possibilities: either the country and the government falls, in which case there'll be nothing to quash, or they somehow manage to establish a defensive line, in which case there will.

  Okay, let's assume there is still a country. It was Uncle's order that sent my division to the west. They'll be howling for his blood . . . so he'll give them mine. And these three crewman will testify against me. They have to go. But I need them for now to get me out of here, so they cannot go just yet.

  Once we're at sea, then, I can dispose of them . . . but how to do it? Shoot them? Tough to do and the driver, in particular might escape. Sink the tank? Also hard to do and, what's more, I don't want to get sucked down with it.

  Aha! I know. When we get close to land I'll get out, as if to wave for help, then drop a couple of grenades into the turret. Grenades leave little trace even if they should somehow recover the tank.

  My story? Let's see. I had gotten out of the tank just as we approached land to get a better view. After all, the land has become unsafe and I had to watch out for the crew's welfare. Suddenly—"I don't know how"—the tank caught f
ire and blew up. I was thrown overboard. My life vest must have kept me afloat. When I awakened the tank was gone. I drifted for a while, then when I got close enough to land I swam for it.

  Okay . . . that's plausible and there'll be no one left to contradict my story. Uncle can press the charges and then have them dropped for lack of evidence.

  * * *

  The setting sun cast its fiery light directly into Diaz's eyes. He couldn't see a thing ahead of him. He knew there was no sense in pressing on, yet felt he had to. The Estado Major, the general staff, had to learn the full extent of the disaster.