And yet… and yet… familiarity had dulled the fear. The disgust was severe still, but not the paralyzing force it had been. It was a remarkable thing to the Indowy, to be not so afraid as the situation warranted. More remarkable still was it to be less disgusted by the slaughter his mind envisioned. He was finding he could face both fear of dying and fear of killing a bit better than he had ever imagined.
And, too, Rinteel was discovering that he could kill, had killed, vicariously and without any moral dilemma. After all, though it was the crew that fired the gun, it was he, Rinteel, who made sure that gun was in full operating order. And he thought, And though it is the humans who actually fight the Posleen; it is we, the Indowy, who build them the weapons to fight with. How pure we think ourselves, how above the blood and slaughter. Yet that slaughter would be impossible without us. A foolish people mine, to think that distance from murder turns it into something besides murder.
Tiger Anna, Oder-Niesse Line, 3 February 2008
God, I was a soldier, not a murderer. Do you hate me so much then, that even this sin I must commit.
Hans’ loader, eyes fixed on the screen before him, announced, “Up!”
Through his helmet’s VR, Hans looked upon the frozen-over river. He could see that Krueger’s bow guns were having an effect. He could also see that effect was not enough.
Hans’ vision fixated on a screaming little blond Polish girl held firmly in the grasp of an alien.
Look at the little girl, Brasche. You have killed hundreds of people in your life, maybe thousands. You tried to think they were all armed enemies. Yes, on how many villages did your fire fall, villages containing little girls like that one? On how many did you call artillery? For how many did the armored spearheads of which you were a part open the way for the Einsatzgruppen? You are already a murderer ten thousand times over.
What are a few thousand more, after all?
Hans thought, Anna, forgive me. If this causes me never to come to you, forgive me please. Hans’ finger pressed the firing stud.
Wiesbaden, Germany, 3 February 2008
Thomas’ hand hesitated over the detonator. He could see the bridge. He could see, too, the horde of aliens crossing on it. But he could also see and hear the mass of French civilians the aliens drove among and ahead of them. Again and again the young French soldier tried to force his hand to complete the circuit. Again and again he failed.
Nearby, Sergeant Gribeauval fired his rifle at the crossing aliens.
“Damn it, boy, blow the bridge!” he screamed.
The boy stammered, “I… I… I can’t, Sergeant.”
“Merde,” the sergeant said. He was barely keeping the leading Posleen away from the wires that connected the detonator with the explosives affixed to the bridge, just barely. He couldn’t get away from his firing position long enough to set off the charges without risking that those charges would be made ineffective in that time. “Boy, drop the bridge!”
“Sergeant, I am trying… but…”
Gribeauval turned from the firing position. “Merde! Just do it!”
Thomas looked at the sergeant, wide-eyed and fearful, just in time to see Gribeauval’s head explode from a Posleen railgun round. The boy was flecked with the sergeant’s blood and brains. Morally frozen as he had been, his terror left him utterly paralyzed.
And, while the boy was so paralyzed, the leading Posleen tore out the demolition’s wiring.
Isabelle trembled with fright. People passed by the field hospital, fleeing to the north. The staff was in turmoil, in a shouting, screaming panic.
The enemy was over the Rhine.
With shaking hand Isabelle made a call to the house she lived in with her son. Briefly, she told her hosts the terrible news, then asked them to see that her boy was dressed and sent to her. They promised they would do so.
Medical orderlies carried away on stretchers those wounded that the doctors thought had some chance. As a truck was filled with wounded it headed away to some unknown destination to the north. Yet the supply of wounded was so much greater than the supply of trucks.
Around her was the din of dozens of moaning, wounded soldiers. A doctor walked among them, announcing, “Routine… Urgent… Expectant.”
That was the dread word: “Expectant.” Expected to die.
“Mon dieu, Doctor, what are we going to do for those poor boys we can’t evacuate?”
“We have hiberzine for some of them, the ones we might have some small chance of saving,” he answered. The doctor’s mouth formed a moue. “But we really don’t have very much of it. Most will have to be abandoned.”
Isabelle went white. “Abandon them? To be eaten? My God, no, Doctor. We must do something?”
“What do you suggest Madame De Gaullejac?”
“I don’t know… but something, surely. Oh, my God… I don’t know.”
Then her eyes fell upon a field cabinet she knew contained syringes and various medicines, painkillers mostly.
“There are better ways to die, Doctor, than being eaten, are there not?”
Following her gaze to the cabinet he answered, “There are if you are strong enough. I tell you though, madame, I am not.”
Tiger Anna, Oder-Niesse Line, 3 February 2008
I must be strong, insisted Hans as he fired yet another round of canister into the mixed Posleen-human mass. He found that he was unconsciously unfocusing his eyes to spare himself a clear view of the carnage he had been, and was, causing.
They had changed firing positions three times now, Anna and her crew. From each position Hans had sent out two to three canister rounds, each shot effectively obliterating most Posleen and human life from an area of roughly one million square meters.
There had only been so many human shields available to the Posleen along this sector. Once Hans cut those down the infantrymen along the river’s edge found they were able to do their jobs. In this sector the attack was being stymied.
But a quick glance at the general situation map told Hans that this was very nearly the only sector where that was true. The red-shaded portions of the display showed that the enemy was already in and among the defending infantry over more than half the front.
Other markers on the display showed Brasche that neutron bombs were being expended wildly. Tens of millions of Posleen, and even some humans, were receiving a dose of radiation that would leave them quaking, puking, shitting, choking and all-too-slowly dying caricatures of living beings within minutes.
And none of it would make any difference. This front was broken… and all Hans’ murder in vain.
Headquarters, Commander in Chief-West, Wiesbaden, Germany, 4 February 2008
Mühlenkampf spoke into a speaker phone lying on his desk. The Posleen had still not succeeded in inconveniencing the Bundespost’s telephone system, though the vicious fighting taking place scant miles to the south did interfere slightly with the conversation.