Borominskar cursed futilely at his misguided and insubordinate underling. “You foolish abat! You incarnate insult to your forebears! You never sufficiently to be cursed, thrice-damned idiot! Turn back.”
“Up yours, old one,” answered the younger God King, Siliuren of Sub-clan Rif. “The enemy is broken and my people are hungry after the long fast you inflicted upon them. I am going to grab my own place in the sun of this world and to the shit-demons with you!”
Not bad odds, thought Hans. Not bad odds at all. We have faced worse in any case, much worse.
Losses had forced Hans to consolidate his three battalions of Tigers into two. Even those two mustered only ten tanks apiece. Curiously, his Leopard and panzer grenadier units were much nearer full strength. It was the drawing of the enemy fire away from the lighter units and towards us that spared so many of them, I think.
The twenty-one remaining Tigers, including Anna, waited patiently under their camouflage foam for the Posleen to enter engagement range.
Hans spoke into his microphone to the entire brigade. “The important thing here, boys, is that there is no ground for us to hide behind. If we engage too soon then the enemy will pull back and just pelt us from out beyond our effective range. So we have to let them come in close. Dial down your antimatter and wait until the bastards are within five thousand meters. Then, when I give the command, fire for all you are worth. There are thirty-eight of the swine coming. I don’t want more than two or three to get away to spread the word among the others: ‘Don’t fuck with ’Brigade Michael Wittmann!’ ”
Siliuren of the Rif chortled at his defiance of his nominal overlord. What, after all, meant it to be a God King of the People of the Ships if one couldn’t exercise the freedom inherent in that status? If he chose to load his oolt in their ships to a new land on his own, by what right could Borominskar object? It certainly had not been because of the care with which he had fed the people; Siliuren’s oolt’os were thin to emaciation by their enforced short rations.
The God King viewed the snow-covered land passing beneath his ship with a certain measure of disgust. It is a bare place, and inhospitable. Why ever did I leave the world of my birth?
An honest answer to that question would have been something on the order of, “You left your world because it was about to be blown to flinders, radioactive flinders at that.” An answer more honest still, though Siliuren was not among either the brightest or the most devout of the People and so unlikely to have read or listened with understanding to the Book of the Knowers, would have been, You left your world because it was about to be destroyed, but it was about to be destroyed because in eons past beyond clear memory, some people called Aldenat’ decided that the universe ought to be a certain way and, for a while, were able to make it look that way.
God, if there is a God, please, if the aliens look, do not let them see. So Brasche prayed and so, if perhaps using different words, prayed every man of the brigade.
Whether a distant God, scarcely in evidence on the Earth as it was, was paying attention, or the Posleen ships’ masters were not paying attention, the swarm of alien ships flew closer and closer to the irregular waiting line of Tigers, Hans never knew. He only knew that the time eventually came when he was able to order, “All Tigers, Fire. Fire at will.”
Siliuren of the Rif barely noticed the voice of his ship’s AI. Indeed, the ships never put into their artificial voices any intonation that might have been characterized as attention grabbing.
It wasn’t until the third time the ship said, “There appear to be twenty-one enemy fighting machines ahead,” that the God King asked, “WHAT?”
It was the last question he ever asked.
“First and Third Battalions, bend in your flanks,” ordered Hans. “Let’s trap as many of the bastards as we can. Little brothers,” — the brigade’s panzers and panzer grenadiers — “cover our flanks until we are done.”
The Brigade Michael Wittmann, much reduced in strength but not one whit in fighting heart, not one whit in their hate, rolled forward to its last victory.
Interlude
Frankfurt bowed down, weighed to the ground under its own ruins. In its way, the gray, ugly city was more to Posleen architectural tastes than were the brighter, homier of the thresh’s dwelling places.
But “more” was a far cry from “entirely.” Athenalras was not sorry to see his people tearing the place down and rebuilding it in Posleen style. Especially was he not sorry to see the places which armed the threshkreen stripped to bare earth. His clan had suffered greatly, wounds without precedent and without imagining, from their battles with the humans.
“God how I hate the vile abat,” muttered the God King lord.
“My lord?” questioned Ro’moloristen.
“I came here, young one, with a bright and shining host. What have I left? Between the threshkreen’s radiation weapons, their fighting machines, and their damned artillery and their infantry which refuses to run unless they see an advantage in it, I lead but a pale, bled-out shadow of a clan. The long body of water the thresh call the ‘Rhein’ is choked to within a few measures of its surface with the bodies of our people. In the east, their rivers Oder and Niesse overflow their banks for all the bodies of the People deposited in them. Their mountains are ringed with our dead. Their fields are carpeted with the remains of the host, sacrilegiously ungathered.”
“But my lord… we have destroyed them. The Germans reel north and south to barren wastes.”
“We have destroyed ourselves. Do not count the humans down, my eson’sora, until the last breeding pair are digested. And that, I fear, we shall never do.
“I wish we had never come to this world,” finished Athenalras, lord of the clan.
Chapter 19
Lübeck, Germany, 1 March 2008
Seven Tigers, along with a half a battalion each of panzers and panzer grenadiers, reinforced with all that remained of the Brigade’s artillery — a couple of undersupplied batteries, stood lonely guard south of the town. To the north and the west, the shattered Kampfgruppen[48] of nine Korps — perhaps the equivalent of a dozen or fifteen divisions, preinvasion — dug in furiously. A further four Korps, or the scraps that remained of them, were turning Hamburg into a fortress to grind the alien enemy. From Hamburg, stretched thin along the Elbe River’s broad, deep estuary, what remained of the Bundeswehr and a few SS, all bridges before them blown, awaited the final enemy onslaught.
Ferries operated by the Bundeswehr Pioneere[49] evacuated what could be evacuated of the millions of trapped civilians and soldiers lining the Elbe’s southern banks. All, perhaps, could have been evacuated in a matter of days had the bridges been left standing. And yet all knew, now — at last — they knew, that some evils were worse than others, and that killing the helpless was not always the worst evil.