“A mixed bag, mein Herr. Brigade Florian Geyer can barely make out rough shapes in all this snow. Even the thermal imagers are having problems. What we have seen indicates as many C-Decs as Lampreys.”
“Will they see us here, under our camouflage foam?” wondered Brasche, aloud.
Though the question was rhetorical, the 1c answered, “Florian Geyer appears still alive and still broadcasting. Perhaps the enemy isn’t any better at dealing with this white shit than we are.”
“Perhaps not,” mused Brasche. He repeated on the general circuit, “All panzers, hold fire until my command. Boys, we’re going to play a little trick…”
Marburg an der Lahn, Germany, 29 March 2007
What a dirty, filthy trick, thought Pieter Friedenhof, crumbling the letter he’d received from Gudrun with the morning meal. “That fucking bitch,” he said aloud. “The stone-cold cast-iron twat,” he fumed. “How dare she leave me at a time like this? And for some low-browed Nazi?”
The boy broke down and wept for a time, even as he cursed the name of “battle maiden.” With each curse and each wracking sob he felt trickle away the very reasons he had been willing to stand fast and die, if need be, to defend his home, his family, his girl.
Weather reports spoke of snow coming from the south, but Pieter felt already as if a blizzard had descended upon his heart and soul.
Hammelburg, Germany, 29 March 2007
The radio crackled in Brasche’s ears, “Battalion Michael Wittmann? Mühlenkampf hier.”
“501st Schwere Panzer hier, Herr General.”
“Brasche? Gut. Very good. Look Hansi, we’ve got a problem. We’ve held the enemy along this line for two days now but it looks like they’ve given up unsupported frontal charges for the nonce. I’d be happy for the breather except that those fucking landers are going to chew up our forward men something awful. I want you to — ”
“General, I have an idea,” Hans interrupted.
For a moment the radio was silent: Mühlenkampf mulling the Knight’s Cross he knew hung at Brasche’s throat.
“What’s your idea, Hansi?”
“Have everyone on the forward trace except the dismounted infantry shut down completely. Hold the line with artillery — the shells are holding up well, yes?”
“We’ve enough,” conceded Mühlenkampf. “But the reports are clear, Brasche: there are always leakers through the heaviest barrage.”
“Not so many that the riflemen and machine gunners can’t handle, for a while anyway, Herr General. And if you keep using the panzers those C-Decs and Lampreys will eat them for a snack.”
“Taking care of those is your job, Hans,” Mühlenkampf insisted.
Brasche wiped a few beads of sweat, nervous sweat, from his forehead. “Yes, Herr General. But at five-to-one odds I won’t be able to do enough… not without a little cleverness.”
“Wait, out,” ordered Mühlenkampf as he tried to force rational thought through a sleep-starved brain.
Brasche insisted, “There’s little time to decide, sir. My way has a chance.”
“What is your way, Hansi?”
Brasche proceeded to explain. As he did so those of his own crew grew wide-eyed and shuddering. Was their commander stark raving mad?
Marburg an der Lahn, Germany, 29 March 2007
“This is madness,” muttered the demoralized Friedenhof from the relative safety of a reverse slope. “Madness.”
In the boy’s ears, the sound of the enemy grew ever closer, an ominous cacophony as distinct from the overhead rattle of defending artillery as, in a more traditional day, had been the pounding of hoofs from setting of pikes or the drawing of sabers. As steadily as grew the crescendo of clawed feet tramping ground, boma blades being drawn, hisses and snorts and incomprehensible grunts, each foot soldier of the 165th Infantry division felt and even seemed to hear his own heart pounding ever more frenziedly in his chest.
Suddenly, like a cloud of mist arising from a river, the enemy appeared. He came first as a swarm of flying sleds, the God Kings’ tenars. These the snipers of the division Jaeger[35] battalion took under fire. Yet there were more tenar than snipers, and they were hard to hit and, oh, very well armed. Though more than a few of the sleds disappeared in actinic spheres, snipers were blasted to bits and burned to cinders by return fire for each tiny victory they earned over the invaders.
Scant minutes following the appearance of the tenar-riding God Kings, Friedenhof’s eyes widened as the rest of the host made its sudden appearance. They appeared to him as a solid mass, a veritable phalanx of reptilian, centauroid flesh — all snapping teeth and flashing blades. Artillery began carving huge slices from that body, as from the bodies that composed it. Yellow flesh and blood, yellow bone and sinew soon festooned the very top of the landmass to Friedenhof’s front.
Heedless of the losses, the alien horde swarmed down and towards the reverse military crest along which the defenders had erected their defenses.
Suddenly, on command, the Germans began to lash back. MG-3s, direct descendants of “Hitler’s Zipper” of World War Two fame, lent the air the sound of an impossibly large number of sails being ripped apart at the hands of an impossible number of giants. Prone gunners were pushed back by the hammering recoil of their guns. The air filled with the smell of cordite and weapons oil boiling away from heated feed mechanisms. Posleen screamed and reared and stumbled and writhed in every manner of undignified death by lead.
Coming through the hell of lead and fire the defenders poured forth, the Posleen next hit a thin line of the mines called “Bouncing Barbies.” These devices, accidental byproducts of an impromptu experiment gone badly awry at distant Fort Bragg, North Carolina, years before, waited patiently for the sense of the enemy sufficiently close and in sufficient numbers.
A knot of twenty Posleen, perhaps as much trying to avoid the worst of the shell and machine gun fire as to close with the humans, activated a Barbie. The mine used a small, integral antigravity device to lift itself one meter into the air. It then put out a linear force field to a distance of six meters. Eleven Posleen fell immediately, alive but legless, their stumps waving helplessly in the air while they shrieked and sprayed yellow ichor into the air and onto the ground.
Its work done for the nonce, the force field shut off to conserve power even as the mine’s antigravity propelled it sideways to cover another small piece of the front. Amidst the yellow blood, the mine’s yellow plastic casing quickly became indistinguishable.
It had only been through the last-minute agency of the Americans that the Germans even had Barbies. Their own political left, or so much of it as the Darhel had been able to suborn, had prevented development of any such unpalatable devices as new mines on their own. As they had prevented the development of usefully small and clean nuclear weapons… and poisons… and anything that smacked of militarism. “No threat can justify the development of such horrid arms,” had been the cry. “No threat could possibly justify…”
Thus, despite last minute emergency deliveries, the German army had but few Barbies, and fewer nuclear and antimatter munitions.
Hammelburg, Germany, 29 March 2007
“All panzers, load antilander munitions. Prepare for a steady stream of depleted uranium. Adjust yield for the targets as per doctrine. And be fucking quiet.”