From his command chair, Brasche looked over his crew with satisfaction. There was no scuffling or confusion as men took their seats and strapped themselves in. Only young Schultz, his main gunner, seemed distracted.
“What is it, Dieter?”
“Nothing, Herr Oberst,” the boy answered.
Brasche raised a quizzical eyebrow. “The boy’s fallen in love,” answered the ever-helpful Harz. “Nice girl, too, if looks do not deceive.” Harz’ hands made curvy motions in the air, exaggerating a bit Gudrun’s willowy figure.
Schultz flashed his friend an angry look. Brasche merely smiled. “Rejoice then, Unteroffizier Schultz. Now you know, perhaps, what is worth fighting for.”
Brasche consulted the map display affixed to the left-hand arm of his command chair. On the display he traced the route he wished his battalion to follow with a finger. He pressed a button to send the route to each of the other twelve Tiger IIIs in his battalion. Then he keyed a throat mike. “Achtung, Panzer. Aufrollen.”[33]
Interlude
Even at the center of the B-Dec, itself surrounded by C-Decs and Lampreys, Athenalras felt the gravitic surge as kinetic energy projectiles passed nearby. The ship bucked around him from the force of the passage.
“Food with a sting, indeed,” he snarled, as a nearby vessel disintegrated in his view-screen.
Athenalras cursed the loss, then issued orders for a concentration of fire against the thresh battery that had destroyed his ship. From dozens of ships, relativistic hail rained down on an obscure mountain in the French Pyrenees. To the defenders, below, it looked like a cone of fire from the hand of God, obliterating everything at the point of the cone.
Far above, another screen showed the Posleen commander a glowing patch of ground, no longer so mountainous. The area was soon obscured from space by rising clouds of dirt and ash, flames from the ruined surface glowing through the angry, dark nebulae.
Athenalras’ crest lifted triumphantly as crocodilian lips curled up in a sneer. “Defy me now, little abat.”
As if on cue, Ro’moloristen announced, “Incoming fire, my lord. Heavy fire.”
Goaded beyond endurance by the loss of the Pyrenees battery, five previously masked, human-manned, Planetary Defense Bases — one each from the Vosges, Apennines, German Alps, Swiss Alps, and Atlas Mountains — lashed back. More of Athenalras’ ships perished in rapidly expanding clouds of disassociate matter.
The God King cursed the foul thresh of this evil world yet again. He sent further orders to his ships. More deadly hail fell from the skies. In the Vosges, the Apennines, the Alps and the Atlas, snow flashed to steam, mountains shivered and quaked, men were charred to ash in instants.
On both sides losses in the space-to-shore battle were heavy. Yet the Posleen could afford the loss the better.
Seeing little resistance remaining below — little enough, in any case, to allow a landing, Athenalras determined the time was right. Besides, who knew if the damned humans had more batteries lying in wait. Safer on the ground.
“Land the landing force,” he ordered. The Kessentai of his immediate entourage raised joyful cries of victory around him.
Chapter 6
They descended in waves of waves, tens of thousands of Posleen landing craft. Far out in space they split into three large task forces, one large group for Europe and North Africa, and one smaller one each for India and South America — those places already being largely taken over by the Posleen who had come before. The Latins and Hindus had really never been in any position to defend themselves.
The invader touched down first on the North African littoral. Along the Nile, and in its delta, Egyptians — Moslem and Christian alike, prayed for deliverance. It was not forthcoming.
West from Egypt, along the fertile North African coast only the ubiquitous Bedu survived in any numbers. The city and town dwellers disappeared into the invaders’ sharp-fanged maws.
Three globes, three out of a total of seventy-three in this wave — fifty-eight of them in the Europe/North Africa force, were all it took to overrun, in a matter of days, the seats of one of Earth’s most ancient civilizations, that and the broad sweep of one of its most ancient areas of barbarism.
Three additional globes were sufficient to drive the Italians, such as lived, reeling into the Apennines and staggering north to the Alps. The streets of the Roman Forum echoed with the clatter of the invaders’ claws on ancient cobblestones.
In the ruins of Madrid the last survivors of the Spanish Legion battled to the death amongst the shattered stones of El Prado. Elsewhere throughout Iberia, Spanish and Portuguese soldiers died at their posts to gain a few days, a few hours, for their civilians to reach the shelter of the Pyrenees, and the Sub-Urban — underground, in this case — towns waiting there. In some cases, this was sufficient.
Four globes had landed in once-sunny Iberia.
England felt as many of the enemy touch her soil. Yet the English had succeeded in raising an army suited to her station. The Posleen who landed there met only cold, bitter resistance, walls of stone and walls of flying shards from artillery. In the end, the United Kingdom managed to hang on to her territory and people from a line just south of Hadrian’s Wall. This was no mean achievement.
The single globe devoted to the Swiss and Austrians made the mistake of landing in a fortified Swiss valley. Hidden guns suddenly appeared all around the landing site. Infantry that could be numbered among the best and sharpest shooting in the world sprang up as if from nowhere. The Posleen force that had touched down disappeared without survivors.
The single globe each that landed on Belgium and Holland left only those survivors as managed to escape to Germany.
France and Poland, bearing the brunt of the Posleen effort, found themselves drawn and quartered. Paris held out for the nonce, as did Warsaw. A few other cities, prepared for defense in advance, did as well. Neither French nor Poles could be said to have been quite prepared for the magnitude and ferocity of the attack. Wishful thinking had beguiled the French while the Poles, never so numerous, still struggled under the legacy of forty-five years of Communist misrule and its resulting inefficiency and corruption.
Charitably, it could at least be said of both that they had fought hard, died well, and brought no disgrace upon their ancestors.
Seven globes hit Germany, bearing nearly thirty million Posleen. These were globes commanded by Kessentai that Athenalras didn’t like very much or think very highly of. There were thirteen large panzer Korps — thirty-nine panzer and twenty-six panzergrenadier divisions, though many times that in infantry, to meet them.
The odds in Germany were worse for the Posleen than they had ever faced in their history. Five of those heavy divisions awaiting them were called “Wiking, Hohenstauffen, Frundsberg, Jugend and Götz von Berlichingen.” One battalion was called the “501st Schwere Panzer (Michael Wittmann).”