by John Ringo
Digna had exactly four working radios now, including those she had scavenged in Gualaca. Two of these were with the marksmen she had stationed to either side, east and west, of the highway. These had settled in among the trees and rocks atop the crest, protected from a ground assault by the sheer rock walls rising above the gentler slope below. The third radio was back with Edilze and the artillery and mortars. Digna had the fourth, waiting with yet another descendant by a sheltered spot more or less by the road that she had picked for her command post.
At that ad hoc command post Digna dismounted hastily and passed her reins to an armed thirteen-year-old great-great-granddaughter, waiting for just that purpose. The girl led the horse away as quickly as she was able to behind the shelter of the northern military crest. There the girl would wait, rifle in hand, until either her clan chief came to take the horse or the aliens overran her.
From behind the shelter of a bush, Digna looked out to where the road broke free of the artificially widened pass. The ground bound aliens entered the pass tentatively and fearfully. Followed by their God King, the normals crept through, and then began to spread out once they reached the northern side.
Digna waited until one of the aliens' flying sleds was into the open, behind what looked to be a thousand or so of the others.
Calling her forward subordinates by name she ordered, "Jose, Pedro . . . kill the God Kings. Now."
Within scant seconds a few shots from the crest were joined by dozens, then hundreds, then thousands. Through her binoculars Digna saw the one sled that had come through the pass swept by a massive fusillade. Bullets sparked where they struck alien metal. In a few moments the God King riding the sled was riddled. The rifle fire continued, however, as men posted along the east-west running treeline continued to engage the few God Kings driving normals forward, south of the pass.
From her own position, centered on her line, Digna shouted, "One magazine. Open fire."
The Posleen didn't even return fire. Less still did they charge. Instead, with their point elements falling in shrieking agony and the strange thresh projectiles whistling around their ears, the bulk of the aliens turned and ran back through the pass from which they had come.
"Cease fire," Digna shouted, the cry taken up and passed on by her underlings.
Turning to the nearest of her platoon leaders Digna then gave the order, "Take your men out and finish off the wounded. Carefully."
Preiss had expected to have to fight a human wave of panicked civilians on his way up the winding road. Instead, he was surprised to see them walking calmly, in good order, and parting to leave a path for his Hummer as he approached. He smiled, more than a little pleased, to hear the murmuring, "Gracias a Dios. Los gringos son aqui." Thank God; the gringos are here.
It was only a few minutes more travel before Priess understood the reason, or at least a substantial part of the reason, for the unexpected order and discipline of the refugees. Rounding a bend in the highway he came upon three men, kicking a few feet above the ground. A small, tough-looking crew of Panamanians watched them die, keeping onlookers at a distance. No sign proclaimed the crime for which the men were being hanged, but the fact that some very young and very old were being loaded onto a small pickup nearby suggested to Preiss the reason.
One of the tough-looking Panamanians, the eldest of the crew, detached himself and walked over to Preiss's Hummer, a young boy in tow.
Through the boy he announced to Preiss, "Looters and thieves. They bring disorder and endanger better people than themselves. So . . . the rope."
Preiss just shrugged. Whatever worked, worked. None of his business.
"I'm Colonel James W. Preiss, United States Tenth Infantry out of Fort Davis. And you would be, sir?"
Still through the young translator, Tomas Herrera introduced himself, adding, "Senior Vaquero to the lady, Digna Miranda. The lady is back there," his head twitched back toward the pass, "holding off the centaurs."
"Do you have any word on what's going on back there?" asked Preiss.
Herrera shook his head in the negative. "There were only the four radios. The lady needed them all back there. She trusted me," he added, not without some pride, "to see these through to safety."
Preiss thought there was another sentence Herrera thought but failed to add. But I would rather be back there, with her, fighting.
Preiss snapped his fingers at a private riding in the back of his open-topped Hummer. The private, whose job it was to update the colonel's map, handed the map over.
"Señor Herrera, can you tell me what I will find up ahead?"
Slintogan pounded the control column of his tenar, fuming with an outrage he had nothing and no one to vent upon. The Kessentai he had sent forward with this first probe of the pass were dead. The normals were too stupid to give any account of what had happened. All he knew was what he had seen and heard for himself: hidden threshkreen had killed the God Kings bringing up the rear of the probe and a sudden fusillade had driven the normals on point into a panic-stricken flight.
Fuming still, he contemplated the natural obstacle to his front. Were it lower, he would simply clear away the threshkreen with concentrated fire from plasma cannon. But the angle here was all wrong for that.
"And the blasted tenar will only float so far up," he cursed. "They might make it, some of the newer ones, but alone, without ground support, they'd be abat bait. And it would take cycles and cycles to blast away all that rock. And I do not have cycles."
More of the same then, only much more of the same. One nail will drive the other. And isn't like we have any shortage of normals to feed into the grinder.
Forcefully, Slintogan issued his orders to the several dozen Kessentai hovering, clustered, nearby. If he couldn't get a direct line of fire to clean off the summit with plasma fire, he could at least have the treetops blasted, and probably set them alight. Fifteen of his God Kings had that task. This time, instead of a mere five to drive the normals forward, he would use four times as many, plus a few. Even if he lost some that should leave enough to ensure that the drive didn't lose momentum.
Of course, momentum of the nestling into the preserved-nestling-in-an-intestine-casing grinder is, from the nestling's point of view, not a particularly good thing.
The aliens still looked frightened, in Digna's binoculars, but they looked perhaps a little more determined too.
This one is going to be tougher, she thought.
At that point, the sky was lit by dozens of plasma bolts, streaking across. Most hit the treetops, which began to burn.
"We have to pull back one hundred meters, Mamita," said one of her grandsons over the radio. "It's too hot, literally too hot, to stay here."
"One hundred meters," Digna agreed. "No more. And be prepared to reoccupy on the double."
"Si, Mamita."
"Edilze, this is Abuela. Are you ready to fire?"
The young granddaughter—well, she was young to Digna for all that Edilze was just into middle age—answered as well, "Si, Mamita."
"What's your time of flight again?" Digna asked.
"Thirty-seven seconds from you giving the command to impact," Edilze answered.
"Fine. I want your ammunition bearers standing by with rounds in their hands for when I call."
"They already are, Mamita."
Digna smiled, briefly, at the calm in her granddaughter's voice. Edilze was one of the good ones.
The thought was interrupted by an eruption of rifle fire from her line. The oncoming horde had reached maximum effective engagement range, about five hundred meters for targets as large as the centaurs, as closely packed together as they were. They were falling almost as fast as they were advancing. Return fire seemed to be going high, for the most part. Maybe they needed closer supervision from their God Kings to use their railguns accurately. Digna didn't know. In any case, she heard few human screams of pain or calls for "Medic!"
"Edilze, Abuela. Give me thirty rounds. Fire."
"Ro
ger, Mamita. Firing now."
Digna thought she felt the firing of the heavy mortars far to the rear. Certainly, she wouldn't actually hear them for several seconds more. She shouted out some encouragement to her troops, and gathered two clackers for the gringo-provided claymore mines that fronted her troops' firing line. Mentally she counted down, "Thirty-five . . . thirty-four . . . thirty-three . . ."
The Posleen must be terribly close, she felt. Two of the militia flanking her ceased fire for a moment to fix their bayonets. Digna risked a look over the parapet fronting the enemy and saw that the lead aliens were, indeed, no more than seventy-five meters away, falling almost as fast as they closed. The key word, of course, was "almost."
Still counting, "Eleven . . . ten . . . nine . . ." she squeezed the clackers.
Instantly, thirty-four claymores detonated, sending nearly twenty-four thousand ball bearings screaming into the Posleen. For a brief moment, the alien advance stopped cold. In this respite, the firing from Digna's defenders picked up again, seeking out lone aliens through the smoke of the claymores' blasts.
"Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . ."
Ahead, in the pass, heavy mortar shells began exploding right in among the tightly pressed normals. Their own shattered bones added to the flying debris that felled the aliens, right and left.
The mortar fire lasted only for a few seconds, yet in those seconds a gap was opened up between the Posleen nail and the other nails driving it.
In that pause, while stunned and confused normals milled about over the entrails of their peers, Digna stood up, rifle in hand.
Ostentatiously unsheathing a bayonet to show what she wanted her children, real and adopted, to do, she affixed it to the front of her rifle.
"Fix bayonets . . . Chaaarge!" she screamed, launching her less-than-five-foot frame forward.
With an inarticulate cry, her children leapt forward as well. They soon overtook their tiny commander, reaching the confused Posleen well before she did. As stunned as they were, and terrified by thresh that fought back, the Posleen barely resisted. A few tried to fight and were gunned or stabbed down. Others stood there, helpless, while bayonets sought out their vitals.
The bulk of them ran like nestlings from the sausage maker, pouring into the gap created by the one short blast of intense mortar fire. At the gap, the lead Posleen in the rout ran head on into the next wave following. Instead of being forced back into the fray, however, the routers simply barreled into their fellows, bellowing, snarling, scratching, biting and slashing to get away from the little demons that followed on their heels.
The panic spread from there as the lead elements of the next Posleen wave caught it from their routing fellows. They turned about, and in turning, turned still others. In moments the entire leaderless mess was racing headlong toward the Pacific Ocean, just visible to the south.
South of the pass Slintogan's crest sagged.
"Demons of shit and fire," he whispered, "but I hate these humans."
Using the communication device on his tenar, he ordered his God Kings to fall back as well. There would be no stopping this rout until the normals had exhausted themselves, and that would not happen for hours. No sense in wasting his few intelligent and well armed followers on what was, for now, a hopeless endeavor.
Tomorrow. We'll try again tomorrow.
To the north, Preiss made a call back to his TOC, at Chiriqui Grande. The troops were landing in mass now, trucks rolling from the landing craft one after another. The S-4, his logistics officer, was organizing the regimental trucks to begin moving the troops forward tonight. By morning, so he was told, the regimental artillery, a battery of 105 millimeter guns, would be in position to support all the way to Hill 2213 and a few kilometers past.
Someone, that old woman Herrera had mentioned, so Preiss supposed, was still holding the pass, it seemed. The steadily streaming refugees confirmed this. Preiss could only be impressed. He pictured in his mind some tough ancient crone, bent over and walking with the aid of a cane. She must be one tough old bird, to be hanging on this long, with scrapings and cast offs. I hope we can get there by tomorrow.
In the dark tropical night Digna passed off control of the mortars to her two groups of sentinels on either side of the pass. She'd have given her newly reborn virginity in a heartbeat for some of the light amplifying or thermal sights the gringos had in such abundance. But, though the Norteamericanos had been fairly generous to Panama, most of what had been gifted had gone to the regulars, not little bands of militia like hers. In her illicit trading she had almost, but not quite, managed to secure a brace of the larger night vision devices for her battery.
I should have met those black market bastards' price, she fumed silently.
A freight train racket rattled by overhead, followed by a hollow pop. The pop was followed in turn by a fluting sound as the casing of a mortar illumination round slid off of a shell and rotated down to the ground. A few seconds later it impacted with an audible thud. At about the same time the illumination shell's parachute deployed and the flare lit upon a scene of utter frightfulness, massed ranks of Posleen moving into an assault position. They filled the landscape as far as the eye, aided by aerial flare, could see.
A plaintive voice came from her radio. "Mamita, there's a sea of them out there, just forming up in rectangles and going to sleep on their feet. Can't I please use some HE on them?"
Digna thought about that. Does it make a bit of difference if we kill some now? Does it matter if we cost them some sleep or make them move a bit? Somehow, I think not. Better things to use the shells on. Better times to use them. Like tomorrow, at first light, just before they move into the attack.
Into her radio she answered, firmly, "No. We'll hit them in the morning. Just use the illumination rounds—and use them sparingly—to keep track of where they are for the mortars. At an hour before first light"—she had never quite gotten around to explaining the concept of Beginning of Morning Navigable Twilight to her girls and boys so "an hour before first light" would have to do—"we'll hit them where they're assembled. It ought to buy us some more time and kill a fairly large number of the swine."
"Si, Abuela," the young man on the other end answered. "I'm sending coordinates to Edilze as I identify them."
"Good man, Grandson. Your abuela is proud of you. Let me know if they begin to stir."
"Mamita, it's time," the boy announced, handing a cup of steaming coffee to Digna as she sat abruptly upright. She looked around, guiltily, before fixing her eyes on her great-grandson's dim face. Nothing untoward. Good. At least I didn't make any noise. Either that, or the boy's too polite to let me know he knows. Damn these hormones, anyway.
She took the coffee, sipped at it, then rubbed some of the caked crud from her eyes. She looked around at her surroundings. Still darker than three feet up a well digger's ass at midnight. Also good.
Digna consulted her watch, an incongruous dainty, gold thing; a gift from her husband on their fiftieth anniversary. She'd been dreaming of her wedding night when the boy had roused her. . . .
No time for that now.
"Radio," she ordered, and the boy passed over the handset.
"Edilze, this is Abuela, over."
"Here, Abuela," the radio came back, instantly. Yes, Edilze is one of the good ones.
"Ammunition status, over?" Digna asked.
"Sixty-two rounds illumination; six hundred thirty-seven rounds high explosive."
"Firing status, over?"
"I've preplanned thirty-three targets plus almost continuous illumination until the sun rises," the granddaughter answered. "Three of the targets are the center of the pass and two hundred meters north and south of it."
"Good, wait, over. Group one, group two, Abuela, over."
"Here, Mamita," "Aqui, Abuela," came the answers.
"Rouse your people, then stand by to adjust fires. Abuela, out."
Digna stood and looked left and right. There was movement there, to both s
ides, as her people roused themselves from slumber and resumed their defensive positions. She passed the word by runner to either side to stand to and be ready.
When she was certain her people were as ready as they would be she rekeyed the radio microphone and ordered, "Edilze, Abuela. Commence firing."
Preiss jerked awake as the still jungle air was rent by repeated explosions. He'd had no idea that there was a mortar position nearby when he'd ordered his driver to pull over the night before. Now there could be no doubt of it as the muzzle flash of multiple firing mortars lit the area like a strobe light.
