by John Ringo
She needed every bit of that… and more.
“Johann, halt, facing left,” ordered Prael. Mueller quickly slewed the tank to a full stop while twisting her ninety degrees to the left.
Even while Mueller was slowing, then stopping the tank, Prael was setting his own aiming instrument on a Posleen ship, thirty miles away. When he had found the target on the commander’s sight on he ordered the tank to lock on. Brunhilde’s AI dutifully did so, then reported the fact.
Nervously, Prael waited while the railgun gave off three distinct thrums, each about twelve seconds apart. Finally, Schlüssel announced, “Hit.”
Prael immediately commanded, “Reinhard, target, B-Dec, nine o’clock, very high.”
Schlüssel, acting much like an automaton, pressed the button for the gunner to take over the commander’s selected target. He announced, “Got it,” then began to lead the Posleen ship.
Prael began to search the database for the next best target; began and stopped when he saw something incoming that was moving too fast and in the wrong direction to be a target.
“Scheisse,” he said. “Incoming! Johann back us up… fast!”
Mueller, understanding the note of desperation in Prael’s voice, immediately threw the tank into reverse. Though the tank’s superb suspension and almost incredible mass sheltered the other crew from any real feeling for the destruction, Mueller’s sensitive and knowing hands on the controls felt every crumbled building and even the pulverization of the town’s simple and thoughtful monument to her Great War and World War Two dead.
There was little left of the center of the tiny, picturesque farming town of Grosslangheim once Brünnhilde had backed through. The shock of the impacting KE projectile shook the rest of the town to its foundations.
* * *
Rinteel, too, was shaken and sweat-soaked. He had been somewhat untroubled by the occasional sniping Brünnhilde had done early on. He simply did not consider, would not let himself consider, the sentient beings on the receiving end. Brunhilde’s railgun simply launched projectiles into space or sky and that was the end of it, as far as the Indowy’s mind would permit.
The material coming back, “incoming” as the human crew said, was another matter entirely. Brünnhilde picked up, but deamplified, the thunderous crashing. So too, she gave the crew, at reduced sound levels, the sense of impact when a KE projectile hit. The tank could do nothing to reduce the shaking and rocking of the tank from a near miss; the Indowy found himself tossed and bruised by the ill-fitting straps of his battle station.
* * *
“I’ve got a hydraulic leak in right track section three,” Mueller announced. “Not bad but increasing. Inboard.”
“Rinteel, see to it. Schmidt, go with him and assist.”
Ignoring the two-being human and Indowy team unbuckling themselves and crawling along the floor of the tank to an access panel that led below, Prael asked, “Reinhard, have you got target on that fucker yet?”
“Just a second… coming… almost… AHA!” Brünnhilde shuddered again with the release of another KE round. Instantly the hydraulic elevator and rammer fed another round to the railgun’s launch rack. Schlüssel waited for the fiery bloom that confirmed a hit before firing another round.
Already Prael was searching the sky for another target for his gunner.
Below the tank, the cobblestone streets of Grosslangheim cracked and splintered.
Mainz, Germany, 15 January 2008
Roman soldiers and citizens had once walked the city’s streets. Feudal knights had held tourneys for her folks’ entertainment. Gutenberg, of movable type fame, had been born and raised there. Smashed in the Second World War, modern Mainz, still retaining much of its medieval charm, had arisen, phoenixlike, from its ruins.
Mainz would never rise again. Blasted by everything from space-borne kinetic energy weapons, to ground-mounted and carried arms, to human artillery fired in support of its recent defenders, the city was nothing more than a ruin of ruins. Soon enough, the Posleen harvesting machine would erase even those. Gutenberg’s ghost would wander in vain looking for a landmark. Roman soldiers and feudal knights, peasants and burghers, artists and artisans; no trace would remain, all would be forgotten.
Through the streets, dodging and flowing around the chunks of ruined buildings littering them, the Posleen horde marched like a flood. Above, silently, the tenar of their God Kings hovered, ever alert for threshkreen holdouts. There were a few of these, men deliberately left behind or detached from their units and lost amongst the ruins. But so few remained that each shot was met with a torrent of fire; plasma cannon, railgun, even high-velocity missile.
From time to time a storm of shells would fall upon the remnants of a major intersection to splash some small part of the Posleen river like a creek struck with a rock. But, as with water, the Posleen always closed up and continued their flow. There might be thresh ahead, after all.
Mainz — ancient Mainz, human Mainz — was fast disappearing under the yellow tide.
Wiesbaden, Germany, 15 January 2008
What might have been an easy half day’s march, Mainz to Wiesbaden, for seasoned infantry in good order, with an open road, had been a nightmare trudge lasting the better part of five days for the masses of panic-stricken civilians, mostly Germans mixed with lesser numbers of French.
Each night Isabelle and her remaining son had gone to sleep — such miserable, fitful, half-frozen sleep — wherever fate had brought them to that point. Only mutual body heat and the thick blankets Isabelle had ported had kept them alive. Of food there had been none after the bits Isabelle had carried, long since exhausted. Of water there had been little beyond chewed dirty snow and the occasional muddy, chemical-tasting pool or crater. Even Germans required time to plan such a move, she thought, not without a sense of bitter vindication.
But that sense of vindication could not last, not faced with the generosity of the Wiesbadeners who opened their hearts, their homes, and — best of all — their food lockers to the passing refugees. With a belly full, her youngest baby cradled in her arms, in a warm bed in a heated home, with the Rhine River and an army between her and the aliens, Isabelle felt safe for the first time since leaving Hackenberg.
Only recurring nightmares about her other son disturbed her sleep.
* * *
Closer to his mother than either of them would have believed possible, Volunteer De Gaullejac, his sergeant, and the battered remnants of their platoon kept watch from a stout stone building looking over the bridge crossing the Rhein. Young Thomas had never imagined such a sea of humanity as he had seen crossing the bridge.
The platoon’s job, as part of the company, was to ensure that the bridge did not fall into alien hands. None spoke of it, yet each man knew what it meant. If the aliens showed up it did not matter who was on the bridge — French, German or the Papal Guard, it must be dropped.
Thomas was not sure he could. After all, his mother and little brother might be among those thronging to safety.
A flight of half a dozen tenar, the aliens’ flying machines, appeared over the water heading for the friendly side of the bridge.
“They must have slipped around the defenders on the far side,” muttered Gribeauval.
The aliens stopped over the river, open targets for all to see and all within range to engage, and turned their weapons on the thronging masses of noncombatants on the bridge.
“Don’t shoot boys,” Gribeauval ordered. “Let the others handle it. Those aliens are trying to get us to open up. If they do, they’ll swarm us, most likely, and the bridge won’t be dropped.”
Even as the sergeant spoke, from his peephole Thomas saw one of the aliens thrown from his flying sled to fall, arms and legs waving frantically, to the cold waters below. The remainder of the aliens continued to rake the refugees with railgun fire.
Even at this distance, Thomas could faintly make out the shrieks and cries of terror of the civilians under attack. He saw more bodies,
human ones, fall to the water. Some, so it seemed from the way they clawed at air on the way down, jumped to certain death rather than stand one more minute helpless under Posleen fire.
The boy prayed that his mother and little brother had already passed safely.
Tiger Anna, Oder-Niesse line, 16 January 2008
A few refugees, slow but lucky, still managed to worm their way through Posleen lines and make their stumbling passage across the charred-body choked cookhouse that was the Niesse River. Hans had, for a while, sent patrols across to meet and guide any that could be found to safety on the western bank. Casualties among the patrols, however, had been fierce. Within days he had had to order the practice stopped. Any civilians that could find their way across would be welcome. But he would risk no more men on such a fruitless task.
The most recent group, some seven half-starved and completely terrified refugees, were Poles. They were being fed, at Hans’ order, under Anna’s shelter and from the tank’s own stores. A small fire had been built under the tank, as much for morale as for warmth. There was something about a fire, something ancient and beyond words. Hans had one built whenever the tactical situation permitted. The crew would often gather there, to warm their hands by the flickering light. The Poles, too, gathered by it.
Only one spoke any German, and that little he spoke very badly. The man seemed quite frantic to Hans, pointing and gesturing at some new threat, real or imagined, coming from the other side.
Reluctantly, after the Poles had been fed, Hans directed Harz to guide them to the rear. Maybe they did have useful information, maybe they didn’t. If so, only one of the interpreters in the rear could hope to ferret it out.
Still, Hans had to credit the intensity of the Pole’s frantic and failed attempts at communication. He resolved to order an increased alert level as soon as he returned to Anna’s warm hold.
* * *
Though the night was cold, Borominskar, standing by and facing a fire, and with a patchwork blanket made of carefully chewed and sewn thresh-pelt, was warm enough. A cosslain had summoned forth the needed skills to make the blanket from his internal store. Going from feed lot to feed lot he had selected the best of the thresh, those with the longest, finest, brightest hair to make this offering to his God. Carefully trimming and cleaning the freshly gathered pelts, the cosslain had chewed them gently for days to make them change from putrescible flesh to soft, long haired, impervious suede.
The fire was warm, pleasingly so. Its random flashes, the sparks and flickering shadows it cast, brought to the Posleen’s mind a sense of peace; of relaxation, quiet and ease. Equally comforting, the blanket was bright and fluffy, the thresh would have called its fibers “blonde.” It insulated the God King well from the frozen wind, coming unbroken off of the steppes to the east.
The God King found stroking the long, thick fibers of the blanket to be strangely pleasant, almost as pleasant as contemplation of revenge upon the cowardly, never to be sufficiently dammed thresh who had half broken his host.
And the day of that revenge was near at hand.
Borominskar had had a terrible time keeping his Kessentai and their oolt’os under discipline. Hungry, the people were; hungry, frightened and furious at the cowardly thresh’s use of floating fire to defeat the last attack. They were also terrified, at some deep inner level, of facing such a death as had befallen their brethren.
The memory of all those oolt’os burning and suffocating in flame, their piteous cries breaking the sky, still made Borominskar shudder, his flesh crawl.
Still, a few more days and the gathering parties, hungry as they were, would have gathered enough living thresh to make Borominskar’s plan work. The thresh had shown no pity for his people. They might have some for their own.
Tiger Brünnhilde, Kitzingen, Germany, 17 January 2008
“The pity of it is,” said a sleepy Mueller to an exhausted Schlüssel, “with just two of these, we would be three times more effective. With a half a dozen, the enemy could be hunted as if by a wolf pack, and destroyed before they could mass effective return fire. A half dozen like our ‘girl’ here, and the Posleen could not live over Germany.”
“Yes,” agreed Schlüssel. “And then our cities would not be smashed from the air, our fortifications would have held longer, maybe indefinitely, and the poor bastards on the ground would have a better chance.”
“Is there any chance of getting at least a second Model B Tiger?”
“No, Johann,” Prael interrupted. “The information is on the Net for download; the factory and most of the raw material are being moved to one of the SubUrbs in Switzerland. But that process is going to take months to complete the move and prepare for manufacture. No telling how long before they begin to produce.”
“The Swedes?” Mueller asked.
“They have the plans” answered Prael. “They have the raw materials. They even have some railguns we shipped to them and all of the plans for Tiger A and B, both. But, again, more months, perhaps as long as a year, until the first model rolls off.”
“We do not have a year,” Henschel observed from the little cocoon of blankets he had rolled himself into to seek a few moments’ rest.
* * *
Each day in the Tiger seemed like a year of normal time to Rinteel. Besides the constant work, work, work keeping the beast running, work which, because of his dexterity, skill and instincts fell more and more upon the Indowy’s broad shoulders, there was the ever present danger, the psychic torment whenever he let it get through to him that this tank, this crew, were gleefully slaughtering sentient beings.
At least he wasn’t hungry, as he had been for a few days when the food he had carried aboard ran out. He had managed to cobble together a food synthesizer in an unused space between Brünnhilde’s fighting compartment and the exterior hull. It stood right next to what the human crew had dubbed “the Nibelung’s still.”
Rinteel found himself growing more and more dependent upon the product of that still. Through the long days and nights of battle, he had come to seek its relaxation — even the oblivion it could provide taken in excess quantities — as a respite from the horrors he endured.
He noticed too that the German crew never lost a chance to loot any alcohol they could find in any abandoned town. Though, being German and therefore almost as neat as an Indowy, the trail behind the über-tank was marked by neat piles of amber and green bottles anywhere Brünnhilde had found a half a day’s safety to stop and rest.
Right now the tank sat idle and quiet under a thick blanket of camouflage foam and snow. She needed resupply, she needed maintenance, and she needed them now.
Fortunately, the trucks carrying spare parts, ammunition and food had already begun to queue up, under cover of the snow-clad woods nearby. Already the first of the ammunition trucks was parked beside the massive hull, pallets of ammunition being lifted by Brünnhilde’s external crane and stowed below.
While resupply was ongoing, below a large crew of mechanics worked repairs to the massive yet intricate mechanisms of the tank. Still others gauged and, in teams, tightened track, checked the suspension, or performed any number of other tasks required under the fleeting supervision of Rinteel.
The Indowy had nothing to do with the resupply. Instead, he spent his time alternating between rest, food, drink, repairs and reading the manual. Much of the sleep was catch as catch can. The food was usually wolfed down. The drink imbibed served to relax him enough, if just enough, to sleep. The repairs were never ending.
And the manual was… obtuse.
Tiger Anna, Oder-Niesse line, 17 January 2008
The shallow valley of the Niesse was covered in dense thick fog. Anna’s thermals could pierce the fog easily, of course, and to a considerable distance. Even so, Hans had left his operations officer in charge below, seated in the command chair to view the screen and keep watch over the rest of the area via his virtual reality helmet.
Hans, instead, stood in the commander’s hatch atop the
turret listening for… he knew not what. There were no targets for the artillery, not given that observers could not see through enough of the fog to justify using shells that were becoming slightly harder to find than they had been. There was no rifle fire from the near bank, nor railgun fire from the Posleen. Only the occasional rumble from fore or rear told of artillery laying down sporadic “harassment and interdiction,” or H and I, fires.
H and I fires could be said to be the price one pays for making the enemy’s life miserable and uncertain… and keeping him from becoming too bold.
Hans’ mind dialed out the artillery’s intermittent rumbling. His eyes he let go out of focus. His ears, enhanced by the same process that had returned him to youth, strained to find something, some hint or sign, of what had so terrified that Pole.
His ears, enhanced or not, picked up nothing. Hans cursed the fog that kept him from seeing.
* * *
Borominskar cursed the damnable weather of this world. He needed for the humans to be able to see!
And he needed them able to see well… and soon. All his plans depended on the threshkreen being able to see what they were facing. Only that, the God King was sure, would take his host to the far bank and beyond.
Would this fog never lift? Would he be forced to feed his host on the thresh gathered, to feed them before the thresh had fulfilled their purpose? The thought was just too depressing. Already he had ordered the male thresh so far gathered slaughtered to feed his oolt’os. That was of little moment. But he needed the young and the females to see his purpose through to completion. If the fog did not disappear within a few days, Borominskar knew he would have to order the slaughter of even these.
