by John Ringo
After shouting for a medic, Robles contemplated his next action. No sense in staying here; can't see shit. Maybe another position . . .
Seeing a medic and two litter bearers had arrived to care for his wounded man, Robles ordered his assistant gunner, "Forget the tripod. Grab all the ammunition you can carry and follow me."
Burdened with the gun as he was, Robles slipped and nearly fell on the spent casings littering the floor. For a few moments his feet spun like a log roller's before he caught balance on the table that had previously served as his firing platform. Bad sign, he thought, very bad. Well, nothing to be done for it.
Taking a deep breath, a part of his mental recovery from almost falling and, just possibly, a part of steeling himself to go outside to find a new and better firing position, Robles physically grabbed the assistant gunner and half dragged him out of the room and down a short flight of steps. They went through an open door, turned right, and raced to the corner of the building.
Covering behind the solid corner, just as Robles extended his bipod and placed his machine gun to his shoulder, he uttered, "Fuck," as the first BMP up the ramp emerged through the thick smoke.
* * *
Arias was unwilling to dismount either himself or the men in the back of his track until he had more vehicles and infantry ashore. The pitter-patter of bullets striking the armor not only reinforced his original inclination but actually succeeded in driving him completely under cover and even to close his hatch. It would never do to let the inside of the hatch cause one to ricochet into the interior from which it could not escape without bouncing around until it buried itself in one of the crew. Frantically, he traversed the turret while searching for targets through his sight. Nothing. He elevated the sight and gun and swept again. Nothing. He depressed the gun and swept back but the gun would not go low enough to let him see ground level at any of a number of positions that could be sheltering his assailants.
He thought about having the driver back out but, with more vehicles coming up the ramp in a steady stream, he was afraid of an accident that might block the ramp. Like any infantryman, even a mechanized one, he hated being stuck inside his track. What others saw as protection he saw only as a trap, an armored coffin vulnerable to any man with an anti-armor weapon.
I can't back up. I won't stay here. All that is left is to go forward.
Robles' machine gun chattered until seconds before the left tread of Arias' track squashed him like a grape.
"Mount up, you bastards, mount up," Colonel Suarez shouted into his radio. He gave the order as soon as he saw the first BMP break across the street, 100mm gun flaring, and the Presidential Guard breaking in terror. Every now and again, looking through his binoculars, he caught a glimpse of a BMP, with its distinctive silhouette, at one of the city's crossroads along Avenida de los Mártires.
Before the first trucks of Suarez's column had reloaded and joined him at the western foot of the bridge, some of Perez's men had already dismounted and begun to push the vehicles in the bridge's roadblock aside. A few of the cars gave trouble, bumpers locked or tires slashed or simply jammed together. These the men hooked tow cables up—all armored vehicles carried them—and let the BMPs haul away. By the time Suarez's Hummer reached the erstwhile roadblock a path five meters wide had been cleared.
Suarez had his driver pull his vehicle aside and dismounted. A uniformed body, so badly crushed it was almost unrecognizable as human, lay in a spreading pool of blood near the Hummer. Suarez spared the body barely a glance. He raised one fist to stop the first BMP from the one company he hadn't previously committed.
"Go to the Plaza of the Martyrs," he said to the company commander, pointing at his map of the city to indicate a broadly open area to the south of the main avenue set aside as a monument to those Panamanians killed in the 1964 riots. "Wait for me there. Go!"
Eleven BMPs passed, all of the company that had survived the long road march without breaking down. Next up came a truck. Suarez beckoned the man, a lieutenant beside the driver, down and, again pointing to the map, said, "You know your target, the TV studios?"
Seeing the officer nod, he slapped him on the back. "Go to it, then, son and make them put you on TV to read off the statement you've been given."
Three trucks passed, following the lieutenant. At the next Suarez pointed and shouted out the simple question, "Target?"
"Estereo Bahia," the senior noncom in the truck answered over the diesel's roar. The next truck gave a different answer, the DENI—Departmento Nacional de Investigaciones. Three trucks followed that one out as there might be a fight. The next leader gave his target without being asked: the main police station. The next, the Palacio de las Garzas. When the last of the dozen task groups had passed, the dozen needed to take out the most critical assets to a coup or counter coup, Suarez returned to his Hummer and had himself driven to the Plaza de los Mártires. There, he found the last BMP company and ordered the commander to follow him to La Joya Prison.
Mercedes paced fretfully by the open pit dump that was the only treeless area near the prison large enough to accommodate the Himmit stealth transport. The prisoners sat nearby under guard. That is, all of them sat except for one woman who lay on a stretcher, not unconscious but plainly very weak. Mercedes recognized the woman and felt a moment's shame at his part in bringing her to this. Decency was not one of the president's notable features but even he had to see the sheer injustice of prosecuting a heroine of the war for no other reason than that she had broken international law by using the material available to her. His wife saw the woman and the prisoners, as did the one mistress he had brought along, and his children by both of them. They knew enough of the story that their eyes, when they met the president's, were filled with a disgust to match and amplify his own. They saw his fear, too, and that only added to Mercedes' shame.
The Darhel Rinn Fain smiled a wicked smile, all razor sharp teeth, at the president's obvious fear. Disgusting human! the Rinn Fain thought. A remarkably low specimen even for such a low race. I cannot imagine what the Ghin and the Tir fear from this group. With humans, all things are for sale. And what little may not be on auction they can be fooled into giving or doing. They are a vile species.
Mercedes saw the Darhel's smile and interpreted it as calm detachment rather than the disgust the alien truly felt.
"I don't understand how you can be so calm! The bridge has fallen. The plotters will be here in half an hour; forty-five minutes at the most. Don't you understand? If they catch us here, they'll kill us!"
"Do you fear death so much?" the Rinn Fain asked conversationally, his eyes growing distant and dreamy.
"Doesn't everyone? Don't you?"
The Darhel's eyes grew more distant and dreamier still. He spoke as if from a dream. "No, not everyone fears death. Before we found you human rabble there were those of us among the Darhel who volunteered to die, to save our people from the Posleen. I was one of those. I confess, it was something of a disappointment to me that we decided to use your people as mercenaries before I was selected to complete my mission. I had been looking forward to being a true Darhel, for once in my life."
"You're insane," Mercedes accused.
At that the Darhel threw his head back and laughed aloud, something his species almost never did. "Insane, you say? You have no idea, Mr. President. I, all my people, all of us, insane. Made that way, deliberately, by powers beyond your understanding. But, worse than that, we know we are insane, and, knowing, hate it."
Mercedes shivered, despite the heat, at the chill tone in the alien's voice. The Darhel had always struck him as cold and odd. But he had assumed, at least, a degree of sanity. If they were insane . . .
He changed the subject. "When will the transport be here?"
Impatiently, the Darhel answered, "It will be here when it is here."
He relented then, slightly, and asked, "AID?"
The AID answered immediately, and loud enough for the president to hear, "The estimated time of
arrival of the Himmit ship is twenty-two of the human's minutes, Lord Fain."
The damned human water vessel's pinging had become a positive annoyance to Hisaraal. Worse, there were two of them blasting away now.
Ordinarily, he bore the humans no ill-will; quite the opposite, in fact. He had only taken on the mission, after all, because a FedCred was a FedCred and he had a race to support. But under the relentless pinging of what had to be their primitive detection equipment, he was beginning to change his mind about humans.
Fortunately, the Himmit knew, his ship was completely impervious to such detection methods, or even much more sophisticated ones. Still he would be glad to escape from this water and the incessant, irregular sound.
"I've got him," Daisy Mae announced with satisfaction to the ship's exec.
"Are you sure, Daisy?" the XO asked.
"To a considerable degree of certainty, yes," she acknowledged. "It has taken almost all my computing power, as well as that of Salem, to analyze all the subtle nuances of the sound reflecting and not reflecting off the seabed. He is going to pop out here," and her finger pointed to a spot on the map.
"Can you hit him when he does?"
For answer, Daisy just sniffed and tossed her holographic hair.
The guns of number two stopped moving rhythmically up and down like tapping fingers. Steadying at low elevation, they joined those of numbers one and three as the turrets rotated to lay upon a spot of water off the starboard side.
* * *
A mound of salt water surged at the spot Daisy had indicated on the map. The water, frothing white, glided away to expose a flickering image, heat haze over the desert. The image was insubstantial and ghostly but clearly large, perhaps a hundred meters on a side, its outlines revealed by the surging water.
Daisy's avatar suddenly appeared on the unarmored bridge, above the armored wheelhouse. Her eyes and attention were concentrated on the surge, then on the exposing metal. All guns on her port side, plus the three main turrets shifted slightly, creating a fire pattern in Daisy's mind of twelve shells, three high and four across, just above and forward of the Himmit's bow wave. Further east, Salem calculated a fire pattern complementary to Daisy's.
A distant observer on the shore by Avenida de Balboa, in Panama City, would have seen two enormous flashes lighting the sky even in daylight. The one to the west came from Sally's batteries firing. The other, from due south was Daisy Mae's eruption.
"What the . . . ?" Hisaraal grasped the hand holds of his couch as the ship lurched to the sides. Its battle screens easily shrugged aside the puny efforts of the human ship to destroy it but that didn't lessen the mental shock.
The ship master touched a control, sending the ship out-of-phase with normal reality and then another, turning it up and to the southeast.
No Himmit scout-ship master would ever continue after detection. This was a scout-ship, not a destroyer. If he ever made warrior class, though, woe betide these damned humans.
"Communications," Hisaraal said, half in anger and half in sadness, "send a message to the Darhel returning their payment—yes, with the agreed penalties—and expressing our regret for being unable to fulfill the contract. Send a second to the Mother, informing her that the h— that the hu— That the humans have detected and engaged my craft: This mission is blown."
So much for my promotion to neuter.
"Did we get it?" the XO asked.
"We hit it," Daisy Mae replied musingly. "But it apparently had force screens; the radar picked up a burst of high-voltage electrical noise from the impact. I don't think we killed it, though."
"Then did it keep going?" the XO asked.
"I doubt it," the avatar answered. "Himmit scouts are proverbial cowards. They have never been known to continue a mission after detection. But . . ."
"But?"
"But nobody ever knew they had force screens on their ships, either."
La Joya Prison, Republic of Panama
Two Russian-supplied ZSU-23/4 self propelled antiaircraft guns took up positions automatically overwatching the prison and the open landing area nearby. BMPs moved rapidly, mud and grass being churned by their treads, to surround both. From the BMPs poured infantry which faced inward as well, taking up firing positions to supplement the armored vehicles.
At the sight of the tracks and the guns the civilians began to panic. A few guards went for their pistols, but realizing the futility merely took them from the holsters and dropped them to the ground before raising their hands in surrender. In the towers between the wire fences the guards carefully placed their shotguns and rifles on the floor. The equine patrol, leery of an accidental discharge and the massacre that would likely follow, dismounted to lay their rifles carefully down.
Suarez, followed by two BMPs, directed his Hummer toward the large knot of civilians clustered about the open landing area. Pistol drawn, he dismounted and walked toward Mercedes.
The president drew himself to his full height, consciously transforming his fear into righteous indignation at this mere colonel who proposed to . . . well . . . what did Suarez propose? Mercedes didn't know but assumed that a show of anger couldn't hurt.
Hands clenched, steam practically shooting from his ears, face contorted into a mask of rage, the president advanced to confront the colonel.
Suarez wasted no time with words. As soon as Mercedes opened his mouth to speak the colonel shot him in the stomach. Shocked, the president fell back on his haunches, hands clutching his entrance wound, mouth agape and eyes wide with shock and pain. Blood poured out over his hands and ran down his suit jacket onto his trousers. Mercedes' women and children screamed.
The colonel prepared to fire again, then realized that Mercedes was rocking back and forth rhythmically. This was suboptimal. Suarez advanced, lifted his foot to the president's face, and kicked him flat back onto the dirt. Then, taking careful aim, Suarez shot him squarely between the eyes. Mercedes' women's screaming redoubled.
Suarez turned around to the captain who commanded the company. "Separate them. Politicos and the very rich in one group. The women and children in another. Freed prisoners in a third. Guards in the fourth. Keep the alien separate from all the others. No, on second thought, I'll handle him."
While the captain walked off, bellowing orders, Suarez turned him pistol onto the Rinn Fain. With his left hand he beckoned the alien forward.
Suarez didn't like the look of the alien. He had seen pictures of the Darhel, though he'd never met one in person. Those pictures had not shown anything like the happy, dreamy look that shone from this alien's face. When the alien reached a point about ten meters away, the look changed to one of ecstatic fury and hate. The alien leapt at Suarez, needle-sharp teeth bared and claws extended.
A human could never have hoped to make such a leap connect. Clearly, the Darhel had strength beyond that of Man. Not that Suarez had half a chance to think of such a thing. Before he could re-aim and pull the trigger the alien was inside the arc of his arm, clawing and trying to reach Suarez; neck with those sharklike teeth.
Struggling to keep the alien from tearing out his throat, Suarez screamed, "Goddammit! Get'imoffmeget'imoffmeget'imoffme!"
A soldier standing nearby took an infinitesimal moment to fix a bayonet and then raced over. He fixed the bayonet because he did not want to take the chance of a bullet passing through the alien and hitting his colonel. He sank the rifle-mounted knife into the Darhel's back, and blue blood welled out around the wound. Unfazed, the Rinn Fain's teeth inched closer to Suarez's neck, the alien pushing against the colonel's strength as if he were almost a child.
Seeing his bayonet thrust had had no effect the soldier twisted his rifle, making the wound bigger and more ragged. He then withdrew the rifle and plunged it once again into the alien's back. This thrust must have literally struck a nerve as the Darhel screamed and threw his head back before pushing harder to get at Suarez's jugular.
Suarez managed to divert the thrust to his shoulder, which
the Rinn Fain began to gnaw on, ripping blood vessels and muscle and making the colonel scream once again, this time from the pain.
This was almost too much for the young soldier. Nearly vomiting at seeing his colonel's shoulder mangled, he once again pulled his bayonet out of the Darhel's back. He raised the rifle over his head, muzzle down, and took a brief moment to aim it at the alien's head. Maybe the vital bodily organs were some place the bayonet couldn't reach.
The soldier thrust downward again. The point of the bayonet sliced aside the skin covering the skull, then wedged itself through the skull and into the brain.
"Holy shit!" the soldier exclaimed. Even with a bayonet lodged in his brain the Darhel was still chewing on Suarez. "Motherfucker!" The soldier threw his weight against the rifle, twisting the alien's head and teeth by brute force. Even in the open air, those predator's teeth kept up a steady drumbeat, chomping on air as if on some kind of autopilot. The soldier held the rifle down to the ground, fighting against the Darhel's death spasms.
