Half the battalion had already loaded rounds designed to deal with Posleen landers. The other half began the process of opening breaches, withdrawing propellant casings and projectiles, and reloading with depleted uranium penetrators and their more powerful propellants.
The loading went quickly and smoothly. Though they had tried, the suborned left had not been able to interfere with the building of German precision machinery. Even the formerly Communist east had for the most part overcome the red-inspired tendency to produce mechanical dreck in the interests of meeting norms and quotas.
As for the DU penetrators themselves, the left would have shrieked their fury to a ritually denied Heaven could they have known how the otherwise simple rounds had been modified… and why. The use of depleted uranium itself had been a close run thing in the Bundestag, the German Parliament. “Ecologically unsound. Environmentally unsafe. Polluting… filthy.” Aesthetically unappealing. Heretical. Upsets me at my vegetarian breakfast. Forces me to contemplate that which must be denied.
But the left had never known, indeed had had the information concealed from them, that each DU penetrator had been partially hollowed out to make room for a modest amount of antimatter in a containment field. An American firm, working clandestinely with the BND, had developed and provided the weapons, again at nearly the last minute. These, penetrator and carefully contained antimatter, had been mated in great secrecy.
The antimatter device was unique. It had been desired to have a variable-yield weapon, something like the unspeakably politically incorrect tactical nuclear weapons once possessed by both the Americans and Russians. Yet, if depleted uranium had raised a furor, how much worse would have been the ruckus over Germany developing nuclear weapons? Antimatter did not generate quite the same knee-jerk reaction, even though it was generally less fine-tunable than nuclear munitions.
A solution was found to the problem of variable yield, although it was not a solution without its costs and complexities. That solution was a dual containment field. The primary field, which normally held all the antimatter, was very strong, strong enough, indeed to withstand the explosion of a portion of the projectile’s antimatter right next to it. The secondary was weaker, and rather unstable, relatively speaking.
It was possible, with the device, to dial a given amount, up to roughly thirty percent of the antimatter contained in the primary field, into the secondary. Any greater amount would destroy the primary and create a very large, antimatter-driven, explosion. But with the lesser, the primary field would hold even as the projectile, now given a substantial boost by the lesser explosion, drove through the far wall of the enemy lander. A timer would detonate the remaining antimatter when it was high enough not to appreciably affect the Earth.
There was, of course, the possibility of having all the antimatter go off in a single cosmic catastrophe. This, of course, might well affect the Earth and the people who, in ever diminishing numbers, populated it.
It was also possible to set the weapon for no antimatter explosion. In that case, the antimatter would remain entirely within the primary containment field and never, in theory, explode until it reached a point far out in space.
Thus thirteen Panzerkampfwagen VIII As, colloquially known as Tiger IIIs, loaded between them enough antimatter to flatten a small city, even a stone-built German small city.
Marburg an der Lahn, Germany, 29 March 2007
The ancient stone castle stood silent and untroubled, overwatching the ancient town below. From his hastily scraped fighting position, the castle and town beckoned Pieter Friedenhof with the hint, if not the promise, of safety.
“It’s madness, madness I say!” shouted Pieter to his chief, a small and determined looking Hauptgefreiter manning an MG-3. “Madness to stay here.”
“Shut up, Friedenhof, you pussy, and — ”
The gunner’s next words were lost as a Posleen three-millimeter railgun round caused his head to explode in a shower of red mist and red and ivory flecks. Pieter took but a single glance before emitting a wordless shriek. More than half crazed himself with fear, Friedenhof turned from his dead comrade, turned from his gun, turned from his duty.
The boy began to run. As he did, others nearby saw. They too began to desert their posts. Like an epidemic, swiftly and without understanding on the part of its carriers, the panic spread. This portion of the front knew a rapid collapse.
Hammelburg, Germany, 29 March 2007
Even some of the men of SS-trained 47th Panzer Korps had their limits. Under the sustained fire of sixty-seven Posleen craft a few men here and there on the forward trace had begun to run. In Brasche’s screen he saw a platoon of Leopards break cover and run from what could only have been a Posleen reconnaissance by fire. The tanks’ sprint for safety carried them scant yards before a plasma beam slagged, first one, then another, and still a third. The fourth Leopard, the platoon leader’s tank from the turret numbers, skidded to a stop untouched. The crew began bailing out frantically.
The plasma beam touched the tank, igniting it instantly. Caught in the heat-bloom, the four crewmen were heat-seared, flash-cooked. Their writhing bodies fell smoking onto the fresh snow, their own heat melting through it.
“Christ,” whispered Brasche, the name coming familiar to his lips even though it had been years, decades really, since he had believed.
The Posleen landers apparently grew tired of playing cat and mouse with the defenders, spoiled idiot boys bored with their play. Half an hour after flushing that one platoon of Leopards, scant reward for so much effort, they ceased fire and began a stately move northward.
“Steady, boys… wait for the command…”
Brasche never tapped his machine gunner to command the beginning of the ambush. The harvest walked by unreaped and confident.
“An understrength platoon of Viet Minh,” Intelligence had insisted. “Not more than twenty of the little yellow Commie bastards. Your squad should be able to handle them easily.”
Hans cursed the damned frog intelligence officer, though the near presence of over ninety of the enemy ensured that he cursed silently. He wondered if the effort at silence was in vain; the Viets ought to be able to hear his heart pounding.
How could they be so wrong, those “intelligence” maggots? He wondered, as well. The signs are everywhere to see if they only had eyes to see. The enemy grows in strength daily, while we grow weaker. Why deny the reality we face every day? We’re losing this war, too.
But we won’t lose for lack of trying on my part, Hans thought, determination growing in his heart. He quietly patted his machine gunner — BE STILL. As the last of the Viet Minh passed his position, Hans stood, quietly and carefully. He drew his knife, faced up the trail in the direction into which the Communists had faded, and began, silently, to follow.
The enemy landers moved without a perceptible sound, gliding along on their heavy-duty antigravity drives. Although there was no sound, the antigravity created a feeling in those caught below like unto a mix of nausea and the sense of having millions of ants crawling over one’s body. One was passing directly over the Tiger Anna now.