That was fine by him; he wanted to be ignored. He did not want to answer any questions, and he did not want any of the people here or in the city to know it was his fault that they had to leave their homes and stations and flee for their lives.
Finally an old noncom stood before him, asking, “Grenadier Thomas De Gaullejac?” Seeing the boy’s distant nod, the NCO continued, “We are admitting you on the advice of Field Marshal Mühlenkampf’s aide. But we cannot treat you here. The psychiatric section has already displaced to the rear. So, for that matter, has the chaplain. You are to go find yourself space on one of the trucks waiting outside and go with them. Do you understand?”
Wearily Thomas nodded again. Then he stood and walked out of the tent to where the trucks awaited.
Isabelle never even noticed the slump-shouldered, filthy soldier leaving the reception tent as she hurried across it on her way to her own ward. She likely would not have even had her eyes not been tear-filled and swollen with weeping. She had to focus on returning to her own place of work to pick up her youngest boy.
Upon her eldest, Thomas, she refused to think. He was almost certainly lost. The same innocent and sweet son she had raised would never have survived alone in the nightmare their world had become.
Mühlenkampf, his party down to himself, a radio bearer, and a single guard, waited at the same place from which he had dispatched Rolf with the young French boy.
Bad, so bad this situation is. Worse than anything I have ever seen, to include the Russian Front. They are chewing through us even faster than the Russians might have. And I need time.
Mentally, he consulted his order of battle and the placement of every unit down to division level. Hmmm. Goetz von Berlichingen is close. Jugend is close, too, but Frundsberg is closer. Frundsberg is Panzer… almost useless in these quarters… while Jugend is panzer grenadier. And we have two infantry corps within range.
Then again, Jugend has an average age of under seventeen, excluding old SS leadership.
Reluctantly, Mühlenkampf took the radio from its bearer and called his headquarters. “Give me the 1A,” he demanded.
After a wait of a few minutes the radio came back, “Generalmajor Steinmetz, here, Herr Feldmarschall.”
“Steinmetz? Mühlenkampf. Pass the warning and prepare the orders. Ternty-first and Fortieth Korps, reinforced by SS Divisions Goetz von Berlichingen and Jugend respectively, are to attack, without regard to losses, to drive the enemy back from the city of Wiesbaden.”
“I can do this, sir, but are you…”
“Just do it, Steinmetz.”
“As you wish, sir.”
Tiger Brünnhilde, Hanau, Germany, 3 February 2008
The Indowy Rinteel wished desperately to be somewhere, anywhere, but here in this tank, shuddering under repeated hammerings of the Posleen landers that pressed in their attack like nothing Rinteel had ever imagined.
There had been no powerful direct hits of course; Mueller’s deliberately spastic driving made a kinetic projectile strike a matter of, so far happy, chance. The near misses rocked the tank viciously, however. The Indowy’s body had been bruised, bruises over bruises, with every jolt.
There had been plasma hits, more than a few. Yet Brünnhilde’s ablative armor had been able, so far, to shrug those off. A quick glance at his damage control screen showed Rinteel, distressingly, that that armor was wearing thin in places.
Thin too, the Indowy thought, was wearing the courage of the crew. In continuous action for more than twenty-four hours — for the enemy had come looking for the tank from space a bit before their successful assaults across the river lines, the crew had begun to exhibit signs of something very like the Indowy equivalent of the Darhel’s lintatai.
Though with the Indowy it was a cultural and physical issue, not a genetic one.
He looked around the tank’s combat cocoon at the crew, trying to analyze those almost inscrutable un-Indowy faces. All glistened of sweat, sweat pulled forth by fear.
Prael, living and fighting under the desperate pressure of a command he had never trained for, but for which he had so far proved more than suitable, had developed a twitch in his cheek. Even to an alien to whom German was worse than a merely foreign tongue, Prael’s vocal commands to the crew had acquired a nervous, half-mad tone.
Schlüssel’s hands, gripped tight on his gunner’s spade-grip, trembled, Rinteel saw. He had not been able to so much as pull his face from the gun’s sight for over six hours. The previous break in his concentration? Well, the Indowy couldn’t recall it.
Breitenbach, whom the Indowy suspected to be the youngest of the crew, sat shaking. Yet the young man’s eyes never left his engagement screen, his hand still stayed fixed to his cannon’s control handle.
Henschel, running the loader’s station, seemed to retain an old being’s calm, as did Nielsen of the humongous feet. The others of the crew did as best they might.
And the Indowy was, wonder of wonders, terrified and disgusted and admiring all at once. He wished himself to be like the humans, too; able to be terrified and brave all at once, to quake at the heart with fear and still to make the hand and eye steady when it counted. What an amazing species, marveled the little bat-faced, furry, Indowy. If we must have an overlord species — and unless we ever learn to fight, and we can’t, we must — then we could do worse than to serve these humans.
Tiger Anna, Southeast of Berlin, 4 February 2008
In twenty-four hours the crumbling line had been driven back more than twenty-five kilometers. Three times in the last day Hans had ordered his brigade to turn about and lunge back at the enemy. Three times they had driven the Posleen eastward, fleeing in terror. Three times they had carpeted the frozen earth with a blanket of dismembered and crushed enemy bodies.
Yet, each such lunge had also seen the enemy return, in numbers uncountable, pressing at the front and oozing around the flanks. Each such lunge had left a Tiger or two smoking on the East Prussian plain.
The enemy had chosen, so far, not to risk its ships. Hans Brasche smiled grimly for a moment at this mute testimony to the fear in which the Posleen held his much-weakened brigade of Tigers and their lighter comrades.
Out in their vehicles, the lighter troops — Leopard tankers and panzer grenadiers in their Marders — smiled, too. They smiled at being alive, which they would certainly not have been, most of them, had not their brigade commander’s tank ignored the Posleen’s human shields and blasted both humans and aliens to kingdom come.
On other sectors of the front, so the word had been passed, some units had completely disappeared under the alien wave because no one had been able to bring themselves to fire on women and children until it was too late. Great gaps had been torn in the front, gaps that the Germans and their Polish and Czech allies were struggling to repair.
Each attempt at repair seemed to find the front ever more westward.
Hans was facing eastward when Anna’s voice called to him, “Emanations from thirty-eight enemy ships heading this way, flying low, Herr Oberst.”
Hans maintained his smile after hearing that news. Action, something to take his mind from his recent crimes, was a welcome relief.