Yellow Eyes-ARC

by John Ringo

  Digna had assumed they would go searching for the flanks as she'd assumed they would eventually find them. She had hoped it would have taken a bit longer, long enough to finish burying her dead, at least. That grace the aliens had not given. Before the bodies could be decently interred the frantic calls had come from both flanks. She'd ordered the mortars to give priority of fires to one flank, the SD-44s to another. The guns and mortars had fired off every round that could not be carried out on the long anticipated and planned-for retreat. That artillery fire had helped, but not enough.

  She spared barely a glance for the long line of noncombatants trudging the road to Gualaca. Instead, she stood there, at the edge of the long meter-deep trench she'd had dug against this eventuality. Her eyes swept along the length of the trench, fixing in her mind the last few images of some of her most beloved children and grandchildren.

  Digna had buried children before, several of them. But they had been only babies, dying—as children in the Third World often do—before she had had a chance to get to know them and love them as individuals. This was in every way worse.

  The column of refugees-to-be was mostly silent until Digna ordered the gasoline poured into the trench. At that, with the overpowering smell of the fuel blown across the road by the breeze, the deaths became real. As if the first leaping flames were a signal, a long inarticulate cry of pain and woe arose.

  She had not had the heart to order someone else to apply the flame. Instead, a grandson had handed her a lit torch. Almost—almost—she had broken down and wept as she turned her eyes away and tossed the torch into the trench.

  Her grandson, the same one as had supplied the torch, touched Digna's shoulder in sympathy. She shrugged it off, bitterly and impatiently.

  Voice halfway to breaking, she snarled, "Never mind that. There'll be a time for tears later. Get these people moving."

  Her clan and its retainers had retreated with the smell of fuel overlaying that of overdone pork.

  Digna had looked upon that pyre exactly once, dry-eyed. It was still not the time for weeping.

  Dry-eyed, too, she had prodded, cajoled, and beaten her family toward the northeast. There, all through the night, the lights of the town of Gualaca had served as a beacon. There Digna hoped to find safety, at least for a time. Perhaps there would even be medical care for her wounded kin.

  It was not to be. Crossing over the bridge spanning the Rio Chiriqui southwest of the town, Digna had expected to find a defense prepared. What she'd found instead was a town bereft of leadership; the alcalde gone with his family, the militia officers gone with theirs. What was left was not much more than an armed mob without direction.

  Direction Digna knew how to provide. She'd taken charge, ordered half a dozen men shot, and formed the rest into a semblance of a defense. With another twenty-four mortars and a dozen SD-44s, plus a fairly generous amount of ammunition, she'd held the bridge and the fords over the Rio Chiriqui for two days. This was long enough, if just barely, to send the noncombatants on foot thirty kilometers up the road northward in the direction of Chiriqui Grande on the Caribbean coast. The vehicles, and there had not been many of them, were commandeered to carry the wounded and the food. The point of that band was just cresting the mountains as the pursuing Posleen again found the fords to turn Digna's flanks. She began another fighting retreat.

  The little towns on the way were scooped up, the very young and very old being sent northward, along with most of the women, while the younger men and some of the women were pressed into the fighting arm.

  Digna had to order a few more men, and two girls, shot along the way. She'd sent them to their deaths dry-eyed still. I can weep later.

  There had been a moment, there where the fighting had been thickest, that Digna had thought with despair that she would not be able to hold, that the aliens would break through to feast on her charges. Then suddenly, as if by a miracle, the aliens' flying sleds had all turned and disappeared southward. She had no idea why, but relished the thought that somewhere they were being badly enough hurt to cause such a change in priorities.

  With the disappearance of the flying sleds, the Posleen normals had pulled back. With the terrible pressure from the aliens relieved, Digna was able to pull out her expanded forces mostly intact.

  As he was probably her best field man, and perhaps because he was also one of her oldest friends, Tomas Herrera took the point.

  Gualaca Bridge, Rio Chiriqui, Republic of Panama

  "Demons of Fire, curse the Aldanat' who condemned us to this," whispered the low flying God King, Slintogan, as his tenar skipped over the mounded piles of his people's slain. Scattered among the heaped, yellow, centauroid corpses were more than a few crashed tenar, clear indicators that more than mere normals had fallen trying to force a way across this river.

  Internal gasses from decomposition had swelled the bodies, Slintogan noted with disgust. In many cases, the internal pressure had been strong enough to burst abdomens and spill out organs. And then the sun had gone to work; the stench was appalling.

  For a moment the God King thought a curse in the general direction of the now escaped threshkreen, not for killing so many of his people, but for allowing so much valuable thresh to be wasted. As it was, with the bodies grown so overripe in the sun, even the normals could not be forced to eat of them.

  It was enough to make the hardest heart weep.

  But then, this is not the way of the local thresh. I wonder how it would be to grow up and grow old on a planet so abundant, in comparison to its population, that its inhabitants can afford to sneer at nourishing food.

  My people, too, might have had such a chance, if those stinking, ignorant players at godhood, the Aldenata, had not meddled. "It's for your own good . . . We know and you know not . . . War is the greatest of scourges . . . Trust and have faith in us."

  The God King laughed softly and bitterly. More likely this planet will change its direction of rotation than that a group of do-gooders with the power to meddle will refrain from it. Damn them.

  The losses from the attack on the threshkreen ship had been so horrific that Slintogan, normally a leader of about four hundred, had had to bond with four times that many normals left bereft of their Gods. His brother God Kings were equally overtasked.

  And the thresh must have a considerable lead by now. "A stern chase is a long chase," as Finegarich the Reaver is reputed to have said.

  The God King looked ahead and upward at the mist-shrouded mountains to the north. The road he could barely make out. Even so, he knew the road was there and had no doubt that the thresh who had butchered the People here by this body of flowing water would be fleeing up it.

  A long chase and a tiring one. Worse still, a dangerous one as we will never know a moment in advance if the thresh have turned at bay and wait in ambush.

  Near Hill 2213, Chiriqui Province, Republic of Panama

  The sharp crest of the Cordillera Central loomed in the distance, bare rock surmounted by trees. Sometimes, Digna could catch sight of the walls of the crest, rising vertically over the more gentle slope below. It seemed to her that the rock walls never grew any closer.

  The way up was hard, even though the winding, all-weather road was good. More that once Digna, or one of her followers, had to threaten to shoot anyone who refused to keep up. Many of them looked enviously at the horse she sometimes rode but more often led. There was no telling when she would need the horse for a burst to speed to some trouble spot. A rested horse would be capable of that burst where one wearied, even by so slight a load as carrying her ninety-pound frame, might not.

  If some looked at Digna's horse with envy it was as nothing compared to the greedy stares that followed the vehicles carrying the wounded, the lame, the infirm and the pregnant. Enough sniveling, or so thought some of the slackers, just might be enough to get a faster and easier ride to safety.

  A great-grandson handed Digna a radio, announcing, "It's Señor Herrera, Mamita."

  "Si,
Tomas. Que quieres?" she answered. What do you want?

  "I have a truckload of young men that we stopped," Herrera said, from nearby Edilze's battery position. It was on Edilze's radio that he spoke.

  "What are young men doing in a vehicle when we need them to fight? What are young men doing in a vehicle when we have babies being carried and pregnant women and the old and sick still walking?"

  Unseen in the distance, Herrera looked over the dozen or so disreputable, bound prisoners standing under guard by the truck from which they had been removed at gun point. He sneered at them as he spoke.

  "Dama, they stole the truck and forced out the previous occupants."

  Equally unseen by Herrera, Digna's face turned red with rage. Cowardly bastards.

  Digna's late husband had once had a solution for criminals who trespassed on his land to commit their crimes. It was a solution much frowned on in more civilized circles but, in the outlying parts of Panama, and especially in earlier days, it had been a solution the implementation of which was unlikely to ever come to light.

  "Hang them," she said. "Hang them right beside the road."

  Herrera smiled at the twelve—no, it was thirteen—thieves as he took a coil of rope from the horn of his saddle.

  He had no clue how to tie a proper hangman's noose. No matter, a simple loop would do well enough. This he made and then tossed the coil over a convenient tree branch. A shudder ran through the truck thieves as the loop arced over the branch and came to rest a few feet off the ground.

  Tomas gestured with his chin for one of the prisoners to be brought over.

  Hands bound as they were, still the prisoner attempted to wrap his legs around a sapling as two of Herrera's men grabbed him by the arms. A few kicks to his calves and thighs loosened the entwining legs. He began to beg as he was dragged toward the rope, the begging changing to an inarticulate scream as the loop was placed around his neck and half tightened.

  "Did the sick and old who were designated to ride that truck plead not to be put off by you and your friends?" Tomas asked conversationally as he adjusted the loop to the neck.

  "Please," the thief begged. "Please don't do this. I had a right to live. I have a right to live. Please . . ."

  "Haul away," Herrera commanded and the prisoner's previous guards sprang to the rope and began to pull. Once the kicking feet were a meter off the ground he told them to tie the rope off, cut it and bring him the remainder . . . and more rope.

  The gagging and kicking of the first had not stopped before the second, too, was elevated. In all it took Herrera almost an hour before all thirteen thieves were strung up and dead—or nearly so, a few pairs of feet still twitched. The bodies swayed gently in the wind, the smell of shit from loosened sphincters wafting on the breeze.

  There's a stinging advertisement for social responsibility, Herrera thought.

  From her vantage point, hidden behind a large rock and some vegetation, Digna could make out the pursuing Posleen through her army issue field glasses. The aliens seemed to her to be hesitant, much more so than they had been during the assault on the bridges by Bijagual and Gualaca. Too, she noted, there seemed to be many fewer of their damned flying sleds. Lastly, from what she could tell, the aliens seemed . . . somehow . . . clumsy. Not that they were clumsy as individuals, no, but they seemed clumsy as groups, as if their leadership were being strained to the limits.

  "Something has hurt them badly, after all," she whispered to herself. "Blessings on whoever or whatever it was."

  Slower the aliens were. For all that, they were still moving quicker than her column of refugees. They had to be slowed down.

  "But where?" she asked herself. Then she closed her eyes and tried to envision the whole area around the road and the pass behind her.

  South of where the road wound across the mountains was a military crest, so called because it would allow long fields of grazing fire downward and long-range observation. The road itself S-turned through a pass carved out of the mountain rock through the topographical crest, the actual summit of the rise. To either side of that narrow pass rock walls rose vertically, occasional stunted trees clinging to their tiny crevasses and ledges.

  The aliens aren't built to climb those walls, Digna thought, not even with all their strength. Their sleds could get over but they'd do so without the supporting fires of the rest of their horde. That would make them easy meat for my boys.

  Digna looked again at the rock walls. She found no place for a horse, even one aided by arms, to surmount the crest. But I can send people up. A tough climb, yes, but not impossible for human beings.

  She mounted her horse and began forcing it through the still teeming column of refugees. It was especially difficult in the narrow pass, which was only a bit wider than the two lane highway through it. On the far—northern—side Digna found essentially what she had expected to see, a mirror image of the southern face.

  The only difference is that the aliens are trying to climb while our people are trying to descend.

  Digna tried to think back to what her instructors had said about the three types of crests. The military crest isn't worth much, not with the trees in the way, she thought. The great thing about the reverse crest is that I can cover the pass and road from it, while the aliens can't shoot our escaping people from the rear as long as we hold it. And inside that pass we can butcher them with the mortars . . . as long as the ammunition holds out, anyway. We can, I hope we can, buy enough time for the refugees to make it to the coast, to Chiriqui Grande where they might be able to escape by sea.

  With those factors in mind, Digna began to make her plans.

  Chiriqui Grande, Bocas del Toro Province, Republic of Panama

  The sign outside the abandoned school proclaimed, "Tactical Operations Center, 10th United States Infantry Regiment (Apaches)."

  Standing in the schoolyard, Preiss contemplated the curious things soldiers, who—as a class—tended to have no fixed home, would do to give the impressions and sensations of normalcy to create one. The sign was one such example. There had been no particularly good reason to bring it, absolutely no reason to make it the number one priority—well, tied for number one along with setting up the radios—in establishing the TOC, yet there it stood, even while the long-range antennas were still being erected. Preiss could only account for it by the need for soldiers, as people, to have someplace called home, with the trappings of home.

  Preiss looked at the sign again, shook his head and entered the former schoolhouse turned tactical operations center. Inside he removed his helmet—useless thing really, given the enemy's weaponry—and ran his fingers through sweat-soaked hair. His eyes wandered over the map, tracing not only the positions of his forward units but also the positions of the landing craft from the 1097th Boat that were bringing in the rest of the troops of the regiment, their supplies, and their vehicles. The landing craft came in full of troops and gear and left crammed to the gunwales with anything up to five hundred civilians each, fleeing the oncoming horde. Curiously, thought Preiss, not a single one had yet called out "Gringos go home."

  The thing is, Preiss mourned, we don't have the first goddamned idea of what's ahead of us. My RPVs lasted maybe two minutes after cresting the Continental Divide. My lead scouts are still struggling up the jungle slopes. Well, he corrected, not "no idea." I know there are about ten or fifteen thousand more civilians heading this way, refugees from the debacle in Chiriqui Province.

  "XO," Preiss said, "I'm taking my Hummer and heading north. Keep in touch. You're in charge until I get back."

  Intersection, Continental Divide–highway to Chiriqui Grande

  Her horse was behind her, hidden among some loose boulders remaining from when the pass and road had been excavated. Digna, herself, lay forward, between two rocks, looking south through her binoculars.

  Instead of leading, Digna saw, the alien flying sleds were following the mass of the ground-bound ones that first surmounted the southern military crest. The sleds f
ired occasionally, but only at the rear of the groups of the ground bound, as if driving them forward. With her field glasses to her eyes she scanned the Posleen on the leading edge of the wave. She'd seen their faces—similar faces, anyway—many times on the long march back from her home. They had struck her, before, as fierce, threatening and confident, to the extent one could read confidence on such a strange visage.

  Somehow, they didn't look confident anymore. Neither did they seem particularly fierce.

  They're frightened, she decided. They look just like rats caught in a trap. Or maybe like wild animals caught in a drive. Hmmmm.

  Keeping low, Digna crawled back to her horse. The dirt, rock and asphalt were a pain to her breasts and belly but not so bad as a railgun shot would have been. Reaching the horse, she led it a few score meters through the pass and then mounted it, riding hell for leather for the northern military crest along which she had strung about half of her armed and able defenders.