by John Ringo
Then the sergeant settled down to wait.
Rodriguez Home, Via Argentina, Panama City, Panama
"It's the waiting I hate most, Alma," Marielena sniffled. "Not knowing if he's dead or alive or even on this planet. Not knowing what's to become of me, or the baby or . . . or any of us." Her hands went automatically to cover her still unswollen stomach. The thought of the aliens slicing her open to get at the delicacy of her unborn child was too much. Nausea rising, in tears, she ran for the bathroom.
Posleen Territory, West of the Nata Line, Republic of Panama
Hungry, hungry . . . and I, at least, am eating. The same cannot be said of the host.
Binastarion looked down from his tenar at the long dun-colored columns marching below. There was something in their shambling gate that told of weakness of body and spirit. He'd already had to give the order to his underlings to kill and butcher one in twenty of the normals to keep the remaining nineteen going. One in twenty, though, at what the normals ate, was not enough. He knew he must call for a rest before trying to assault this next threshkreen line and that, when he did so, another one in twenty of the host must be given to feed the rest. Otherwise, they would not have the strength to fight through the human defenses.
It would all be worth it, though, if the People could only win through. Ahead, past the humans' lines, were literally millions of thresh and more millions of food animals.
And there was a new thought, too. Though he didn't know where it had come from, the Net had what appeared to be an open offer from the thresh of the continent of Europe. Perhaps the offer had been uploaded by a Darhel AID. Binastarion put nothing past the Elves.
In any case, the thresh of Europe or their Darhel patrons seemed to be suggesting that, should Binastarion and his clan succeed in taking control of the broad ditch that connected the two major bodies of water on this miserable world, trade—a human and Darhel form of mutual edas—might be possible, if the ditch could be kept functioning to allow European water vessels through.
Could he count on the thresh to so succor him? Binastarion didn't know. He did know that he didn't care an abat's hindquarters for what happened to the clans of the People fighting to conquer this Europe. Why should the Europeans care any more for the fate of the humans of these two continents?
It was a new notion, this idea of trade with an alien species, and one that required careful thinking through. Perhaps such an arrangement could be beneficial enough for Binastarion to raise his clan to mighty heights before this world was plunged into orna'adar. Perhaps . . .
Ah, never mind all that for now. I am counting snack-nestlings before they are gutted. For now, I must get to this next line. I must feed my host. Then I must break through the tough shell to further feed upon the soft meat of these thresh. In any case, I have my doubts about enough of my clan being trainable enough to operate this waterway. Perhaps if my son, Riinistarka, had lived. The clan chief felt a great stab of pain at the loss. That one had been something special to his God King father.
Assembly Area Pedrarias, East of the Nata Line,
Republic of Panama
Suarez stood on a little knoll, surrounded by the troops and tracks of the 1st Mechanized Infantry Division. He had walked here from his headquarters near the Inter-American highway, neatly spaced between both divisions of the heavy corps.
The vehicles lay under nets, though the proper term was "screens." These had two important functions. One was to shield them from view should the Posleen attempt either a raid in their flying sleds or a more significant attack with one of their landers. They hadn't done so, yet, but Suarez had to consider the possibility. The other reason was simple shade. This was no jungle area, though it had trees, but rather was mostly open savannah. Without some cover from the glaring sun the soldiers would have roasted.
Suarez wiped a coating of sweat from his brow. It's hot enough to roast even with the camouflage nets. How much worse would it be without them?
Normally, the maneuvering troops would have been entitled, doctrinally, to their choice of ground, pushing the artillery, etc., out to more unfavorable terrain. This had not been possible. With twenty-six hundred guns and mortars lined up within a few miles of Nata Line, there had simply been no room for the mechanized forces.
Suarez tried to envision what it would be like when those guns released a deluge of steel onto the Posleen massed in the attack. The mind just boggled; nothing like it had been seen on Earth since the great battles of annihilation fought between the Germans and the Russians from 1941 to 1945.
There were more artillery weapons, too, nestled north and south among the hills of Chitre and the mountains of the Cordillera Central. These were mostly rocket launcher regiments, each with a battalion of cannon artillery as much for self defense as for any other reason.
And then, too, there were the two gringo warships that would lend their fires. Suarez and Boyd had boarded each of them a few weeks previously to help weld awards to their turrets.
Suarez thought of Daisy Mae's avatar with a smile. Whoever thought a ship's chest could swell at all, never mind that it could swell so much. Odd, too, that the ship should have asked for a smaller version, suitable for wearing around a neck. She's a hologram; she can't support anything material. Ah well, who knows? And the whys of the thing don't matter anyway. For the good she had done us, and especially me, a little medal that she can't even wear around her neck is a small thing.
Funny, though, that that little bat-faced, green alien should have taken the medal so readily when it was delivered.
USS Des Moines, Southwest of the Nata Line, Bay of Panama
"Your two favorite colors are 'ooh' and 'shiny,' Ship Daisy," the Indowy said with an alien smile.
The actual medal was tucked away in a case, deep in the hold where Daisy's "inauspicious cloning" project was coming near fruition. On the wall the Indowy had carefully hung the framed glass case containing her award citation. (A larger one hung near the officers' mess.)
Around her neck, however, she had projected onto and with her avatar the high award for valor given the ship, individually, and the crew, as a unit award. It was a simple cross, in gold, about the size of the United States' Distinguished Service Cross. Unlike with that medal, however, all four arms of this one were even. A small ring was affixed to the top and a ribbon ran through that to hold the medal in front of and at the base of the neck.
Daisy shot Sintarleen a dirty look, then, seeing he had spoken in jest, she answered, "It isn't the 'ooh' and it isn't the shiny, Sinbad. It's just . . . well . . . the part of me that is the hull of this ship is a warship, has the soul of a warship. For decades, it yearned for the honor of battling for her builders. Now, it has the recognition of that honor, and—even more—of battling heroically. Though we are the same being now, still, I wear this representation for the part of me that was the original USS Des Moines."
Changing the subject, but only slightly, Daisy asked, "The skipper has seen me wearing the medal. Do you think he minds?"
The Indowy snorted. "If he minds, it is only that he is embarrassed not to have thought of it himself."
"The crew?" she asked uncertainly.
"About that I can say definitely, Ship Daisy, the men are proud of you and pleased that your avatar wears the award for all of them." The Indowy hesitated, then said shyly, "I am proud of you as well."
"Thank you, Sintarleen. That means a lot to me." Without another word, the avatar bent over and made a motion that, had she been flesh and blood, would have landed a kiss on the alien's furry forehead.
Interlude
Guanamarioch and Zira, both, scratched unconsciously, almost uncontrollably, at the jungle fungus that had taken hold of their crests, their spaces between their claws, and—worst, by far, of all—their crotches.
"I hate this place," Guano said without emotion as he dug with a roughened stick at a particularly obnoxious patch of the crud that had taken hold of his left front claw. He hobbled unsteadily on thr
ee legs while doing this.
Zira, ever calm, just nodded.
"Whatever possessed us to come to this horrible world, Zira? It is nothing like home. It is nothing like any place I have ever even read of." The God King's voice lowered. "Well, it's nothing like anything I've read of except the demon pits where—"
"Hold up, Guano. You've got some of those things on you again."
"What? Where? Get'emoff, get'emoff, get'emoff!"
"I will. Calm down."
Pulling out a short blade, Zira bent over to examine more carefully the half dozen black, ugly and frankly (though a Posleen would not normally use the word) icky creatures that had attached themselves to Guano's torso, perhaps at the last river crossing.
"What are these called?" Zira asked Guano's AS as he prodded at one of the little monsters with the point of his knife.
"Leeches, Kenstain Ziramoth. They are not dangerous in themselves, but once they have finished feeding and drop off they leave oozing wounds that refuse to heal. These then get infected. In a place like this . . ."
"Infected? Well . . . that is not so much of a problem for us; the Aldenata did a few things right. But the loss of bodily fluids and nutrients; this we can't take much more of, not with the little flying horrors draining us daily." The Kenstain looked at Guanamarioch's torso where ribs were beginning to show. "No, they'll have to go."
While Zira worked at removing the leeches, the pair heard overheard the muffled whine of several, perhaps as many as half a dozen, tenar.
"Upper caste bastards," Guano muttered. Zira, still working at the leeches, ignored it.
Above the jungle-muffled whine, Zira and Guano heard sudden shouts of alarm. The alarm quickly transferred to them as they heard the sound of something crashing through the jungle canopy. The crashing grew ever closer for a few moments, then stopped. A few seconds later the body of a Kessentai thudded to the muddy jungle floor perhaps thirty meters away. The God King was obviously very dead, though without closer examination there was no way of telling what had killed him.
Much louder than the tenar and the crashing body, the upper caste God Kings above apparently opened fire at something. Originating almost directly above, the sound of railgun and plasma cannon fire impacting the jungle trees soon came from all around. It was so loud that it completely covered the falling of yet another God King body, which hit the ground closer to Zira and Guano. A minute or so later, but farther off, yet another body struck dirt, a small deluge of leaves and broken branches coming down on top of and all around it. The firing from above redoubled and continued for long minutes.
The jungle went silent then. "They must have gotten whatever it was," Zira observed.
Which Guano would surely have agreed with, except that even several minutes after the firing had stopped, another God King body, apparently flung from its tenar, crashed down almost on top of them. There was no firing after this, only the rapidly retreating whine of tenar heading generally east. On examination, this body proved to have a hole of about one half of an inch on the forward quarter of its torso on the left side . . . and a massive hole, oozing yellow blood and dangling intestines, on the right.
Guano probed around the edges of the exit wound with his claws. He raised his crest, the crest beginning to tear as well as bleed from the constant scratching and said, "I hate this fucking place."
Chapter 31
There are no atheists on battling tenar.
—From the Scroll of
Stinghal, the Knower
Nata Line, Republic of Panama
Properly for a clan chief, Binastarion kept well back, using his AS to project in front of his tenar a magnified image of the fighting ahead.
It's pretty damned awful. Much worse than the first line of defense we hit back by the northwestern corner of this peninsula.
The magnified image showed an oolt, led by a tenar-riding God King, leap from cover and advance forward, firing wildly to their front. At least two of the threshkreen's crew-served repeating weapons engaged, not from the front like proper warriors, but from the sides. The corners of the assaulting oolt crumbled. As more of the People advanced into the fire, they were stretched out, lifeless, along two lines that began with the crumpled, bleeding bodies at the corner and formed an apex almost dead center of the oolt. Some leapt over the neat lines of the messy dead and continued. It seemed that the crew-served repeaters didn't bother traversing to pick of this few leakers but, instead, kept their lines of fire fixed.
Even so, the leakers didn't get far. A steady crackling of the threshkreen's individual weapons and spurts of dust arising from around the charging normals' feet told of many of the human "soldiers" manning the trenches in support of their crew-served, heavy repeaters. In moments, no longer than it took for the last normal of the oolt to launch itself into the lines of fire, the Kessentai in command found itself alone. The God King spun its tenar around, looking for support from the People and finding none. In apparent despair, the leader then launched itself forward at the hated humans, its plasma cannon searching out the threshkreen where they cowered in their trenches.
The Kessentai also didn't get far. Though the repeating weapons did not engage it, apparently the humans had designated special marksman just for the God Kings. The tenar made it about halfway across the thick belt of the nasty "wounding-wire" the humans had laid to aid their defense before a single bullet found it out. In his magnified view, Binastarion saw one side of the back of the Kessentai explode in yellow blood and a mist of flesh. The God King was flung completely off his tenar to fall onto the wire. There it twisted and writhed in obvious agony, binding itself the more tightly to the wire the more it tried to free itself. Some of the intestines, too, dragging down, managed to catch and tear themselves on the wire's barbs, further adding to the Kessentai's personal Calvary.
Binastarion tore his eyes from the scene. We are a harsh and a hard people, yes. But we are not a cruel people. We do as we must to survive, eat as we must. But never could we have imagined such a horrible method of war as this barbed wire. What kind of beings are these threshkreen? The universe will be a better place when they are gone from it.
The People had tried most of their innate bag of tricks in this battle. They had feigned retreat to try to draw the threshkreen away from their fixed defenses. The threshkreen, perhaps because their own wire and landmines prevented it, had ignored the feints and used the respite to restore their defenses. The host had tried massing on one flank and then another. The threshkreen apparently had ignored that, too. The defenses were just too strong for a rapid breakthrough and the forever-damned humans could shift artillery fires more rapidly than the People could mass or maneuver.
Once, at a grisly cost in Kessentai, Binastarion had ordered a ten of tens of them forward en masse on a narrow frontage to try to blast a way through the threshkreen lines. They had succeeded in cutting through the wire, detonating most of the mines, and destroying many of the humans' crew-served repeater positions. Unfortunately, without a mass of normals in support, Kessentai were very vulnerable to the human's individual weapons. By the time the gap was created all but two of the Kessentai were down. When the now nearly leaderless oolt had poured through the gap and taken the forward trenches, the humans counterattacked the confused rabble and driven them out again with even more frightful losses. To add injury to insult, the threshkreen had then closed the gaps with some of their artillery delivered antipersonnel mines.
It wasn't entirely hopeless, of course. Here and there the People had succeeded in taking and holding the forward trenches and even, in one case, the second line beyond that. Moreover, with all the dead lying about that the humans had not had time to booby-trap, the point of the People, at least, was well fed for the first time in days. Some of that valuable thresh had even been passed back to feed a portion of the rest of the host.
Unfortunately, the threshkreen had concentrated their reserves and artillery fires on those few inroads made. The People were pinned in them
, unable to advance and taking steady losses from the fires.
There was one other reason for hope. Binastarion had noticed, as the day wore on, that the humans were becoming tired and, moreover, that their reserves seemed to be growing thinner and weaker. The push that had reached and managed to hold the second line trench had done so, in the main, because the humans had made comparatively little effort to dig them out again.
One big push or a large number of little pushes? Kick the front door of this edifice in all at once or continue gnawing away at the foundations? It will not be until tomorrow's rise of the local sun before I can mass enough of the People to seriously charge the threshkreen's entire defensive line. Until then I can only gnaw. But the more I expend strength gnawing, the less I have to charge with on the morrow. Then again, the more I gnaw today, the weaker their defense when the sun next rises. And it isn't as if I have any great shortage of fodder for their crew-served repeaters.
