The Tir shivered, as much with the threatened disgrace as loss of income.
He could leak the rest. It would cost him the use of Günter, of course. But then again, Günter had probably outlived his usefulness anyway.
It was considered, even among the Darhel, bad business practice to mistreat an asset, to reneg on a deal. Yet the only reward Günter had ever been promised had been the off-world evacuation of his family. No promise had even been made, indeed he had never asked, concerning moving himself to safety. The family was long since gone to a planet far from the path of the invaders.
So be it then, the Tir resolved. The Posleen will be given access to all the information I have. I just hope the idiots can make good use of it.
Giessen, Germany, 27 April 2007
From his thresh-built, gravelike shelter Fulungsteeriot cursed sibilantly. To fall so low, having come so high; this was the stuff of tragedy.
But there was nothing to be done for it; the enemy ring had grown tight around this little enclave of Posleen-hood. Information gathered from the Net told of an encircling ring of fire and steel, even now closing about the throats of the People. Already the wrecked outskirts of the ruined town were, for the most part, back in the possession of the natives. And the natives seemed curiously effective and eager to flush away the last of the Posleen. Why, it was almost as if they took things personally!
Three times Fulungsteeriot had sent his people against the ring of steel enchaining them. Not one breakout attempt had succeeded and the last attempt had not even reached the hated thresh before being broken to bits by their artillery.
Idly, the God King wondered if perhaps he should have saved some of the thresh that had been entrapped here. Perhaps, he mused, these might have been traded for safe passage. Incomprehensible, yet the thresh seemed curiously solicitous of their nestling-bearers and nestlings.
But the thought came far too late. In the first flush of victory what proper God King would think of eventual defeat, or would deny his people the fruits of their victories? Surely Fulungsteeriot was not one such. To the last little putrid nestling, the thresh of this town had been eaten. Not one, so the God King believed, had been allowed to escape.
Yet now, neither was there escape to space, not even for a senior God King like Fulungsteeriot. In their anger and hate the gray-clad thresh had not only surrounded this place, they had moved up more than sufficient of the fighting machines they called “Tigers” to prevent any vertical egress. Fulungsteeriot had tried that route, with lesser characters than himself. The radioactive ruins of not less than seven ships dotted the landscape, victims of the humans’ Tigers. There was no escape upward.
A realist to the end, Fulungsteeriot made no effort to create an illusion of hope, though he had one more breakout attempt planned, one involving all of his remaining people. Still, with a mass of thresh artillery pummeling his people into scraps of flesh and rags of skin, he knew he really had nothing to look forward to except the end.
A Kenstain approached the God King cautiously; there was danger in any of the people, even the normals, when they were in a fight for life. At a respectful distance, the Kenstain gave the Posleen equivalent of a cough, a sort of strained gagging sound.
“My lord? There is something you must see, something I just noticed floating amid the ether.”
“Yes? What?” asked the God King crossly.
“Just this, lord: of the threshkreen encircling us, one group is the remnant of that the People slaughtered near that place the humans called ‘Marburg.’ ”
Desperately, Dieter grasped hard onto the threads of his illusions. Yet scanning though his gunner’s sight across every spectrum, visible and invisible, and from one side of the Posleen-created desert to the next, merely served to crush whatever hope remained.
Stroking the shielded picture within his breast pocket as was his wont, Brasche’s heart went out to the boy, as did that of nearly every man of the crew.
“Why?” asked the boy. “Why?”
Krueger, who felt no sympathy at all, answered harshly from the driver’s station. “Because some pussy in uniform ran, boy. Read the after-action reviews; they are available on the Net. Because some little pansy took to his heels rather than face the danger, your little girl died. We don’t know who it was. We don’t know exactly where it began. But someone ran and started the panic.
“It was quite predictable, the way the pussy politicians shackled everyone’s hands but ours,” Krueger finished.
Schultz looked at towards Brasche’s command chair. Though he loathed his driver thoroughly, Brasche had to admit, “Yes, Dieter.”
“But what can one do?” asked Schultz, plaintively.
Krueger answered, “You kill ’em when they run, boy. Give ’em no choice but to stand and fight. Hang the cowards — low or high — and let ’em kick and dance some if you have time. Shoot ’em otherwise.” Krueger felt a little shiver of delight at an old memory — the kicking, jerking feet of a sixteen-year-old coward of a Volksgrenadier, cruelly suspended a mere foot or so above the ground, the noose placed behind the neck to make sure the boy could see how close salvation lay. The memory brought the same laugh Krueger had given off then, his joy in watching the coward’s futile struggle undiminished by time.
Brasche nodded, hating to agree with Krueger but knowing that Schultz needed the lesson. “It’s true, Dieter. The rot must be stopped as soon as it starts. Sometimes, if you train them right, the rot doesn’t start for along time; maybe not until the war is over. But when you have as much rabble in uniform as Germany today has, you don’t have much choice but to use harsh measures.”
Dieter took the lesson. “And if you do not, innocent and beautiful young girls die,” he said.
Giessen, Germany, 28 April 2007
Under the lash and crash of the thresh’s fearsome artillery concerto, Fulungsteeriot and his subordinate God Kings found it nearly impossible to drive their shattered oolt’pos into any semblance of a formation for the final break out attempt. In the end it proved impossible to create much of a formation. Worse, losses to what a thresh would have called the “chain of command” made it no easier to create a workable plan. Fulungsteeriot and his underlings found themselves feeding their oolt’os into the meat grinder with little direction beyond what a threshkreen might have called a “priority of effort.”
Chance, however, plays a great part in war. It was chance, to a degree, that the wretched remnants of the 33rd Korps had been nearby, chance that Fulungsteeriot’s subordinate had found the information on the Net. Though three quarters of the dug-in circumvallation holding the Posleen in was held by good troops of the 47th Panzer and 2nd Mountain Korps, the area chosen for the “priority of effort” for the breakout was held in part by the defeated and demoralized remnants of the 33rd Infantry Korps.
Well, they’d been in the general area and available…
“Brasche? Mühlenkampf.”
Brasche shook his head in a fairly vain attempt to clear the cobwebs. “Hier, Herr General.”
“Hans, the 33rd Korps — fucking Pussy-Wehr! — is bolting again. You and your… let me see… five Tigers?…” Mühlenkampf waited.