Hans felt a wave of sickness wash over him. “I knew about the tattoo. I never knew about the… other.”
“I was though, for years. For the guards at Ravensbrück.”
Hans remembered some disgusted words from another SS man during a very brief sojourn at Birkenau. His sense of sickness grew greater still, great enough to show.
Misinterpreting, Anna turned her face away to hide forming tears. “It was not by my choice, never by my choice. But I understand why you won’t want anything to do with me…”
“Stop that,” Hans commanded. “It isn’t your tattoo and it isn’t a past you had no choice in. It’s… that I have a tattoo as well.”
“No, you don’t,” Anna insisted. “I’ve seen your arm.”
“Mine,” Hans sighed, wearily, “isn’t on my arm.”
“But…” Anna covered her mouth under eyes gone wide with too much understanding. She turned and fled the trench and went alone into the fire-flickered night.
There were no more “tracers” in space, no new suns that burst brilliantly before fading into nothingness. The battle there was over and Hans had no doubt who had won — more importantly, lost — it. Earth’s skies, once briefly recovered, were once again in the possession of the invader.
Mühlenkampf cleared his throat. “They will be on us tomorrow, gentlemen, if not sooner. Best return to your units now.”
Silently, sullenly, perhaps a bit fearfully the men began to separate and depart, each to his division, brigade or regiment.
Kraus-Maffei-Wegmann Plant, Munich, Germany, Midnight, December 18 2007
The shining behemoth positively gleamed with menace. Where Anna and her sisters dazzled, the new model stunned. From the tip of her railgun to the back of her turret, from the top of that narrow, sharklike turret to the treads resting on the concrete floor, from the twin mounds housing close-in defense weapons on her front glacis to the slanted rear, Tiger III, Ausfürhung B was a dream come true.
“She’ll be a nightmare to the enemy,” observed Mueller, for once satisfied with the armament.
Indowy Rinteel, at loose ends since the Darhel Tir’s withdrawal, had joined the team to help with the railgun. He had no human-recognized degree in engineering, but many Indowy, and he was one, had an almost genetic ability to tinker. Rinteel agreed entirely about the “nightmare” part.
Prael snorted through his beard with disgust. “She might well be. But she is only one nightmare where we needed a veritable plague of them, dammit. It has been the old story. Too little, too late.”
“We pushed for too much,” conceded Mueller. “We should have used the railguns we salvaged to upgrade the existing Tigers.”
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” countered Nielsen. “They will still do good service supplementing the Planetary Defense Batteries.”
“This one could do as well,” observed Breitenbach.
“No,” corrected Henschel, “for we do not even have a crew for her.”
“Be a shame to just let her be captured or destroyed to prevent capture,” said Schlüssel. “And it is not entirely true that we do not have a crew. We, ourselves, know her as well as any crew could, and if we alone are not enough to man the secondary weapons… well… she is much more capable, her AI is much more capable, than the A model’s.”
“You are suggesting we steal her?” asked Prael.
Mueller smiled. “Not ‘steal,’ Karl. Just take her out for some combat testing is all. And I used to be a very good driver.”
Assembly Area Wittmann, Tiger Anna, Thuringia, Germany, 18 December 2007
Tonight’s fireworks put those of the previous evening into the shade. Between roughly ten thousand individual Posleen ships, the globes having broken up, and the fires of several hundred Planetary Defense Batteries and Earth-bound railguns the skies were one continuous stream of pyrotechnic entertainment.
What was it Admiral Nelson said? wondered Hans. Ah, I remember: “A ship’s a fool to fight a fort.” He was right, of course, a ship is. But get enough ships and it becomes only a matter of time, not of foolishness.
There was no practical shielding, no defense, for ship or shore battery. The defenders had only the triple advantages of being able to choose when to unmask, to reveal their position by opening fire; that the Posleen had no cover whatsoever; and that, as a practical matter, they tended to handle their ships somewhat badly. They were, after all, a fairly stupid race. Still, these paltry favors were more than matched by Posleen numbers.
Hans considered some folksy wisdom on the subject: “Quantity has a quality all its own,” and Stalin’s famous jibe, “Quantity becomes quality at some point in time.”
The Communist bastard was right about that one, too, thought Hans, remembering distantly, the sight of burning individual Panthers and Tigers, a collection of half a dozen or more Soviet machines dead before them, while endless columns of Russian T-34s passed the burning German machines by.
A — relatively — nearby Planetary Defense Battery opened up with a furious fusillade of kinetic energy shots, the bolts leaving eye-burning trails of straight silver lightning in the sky. Overhead, a half dozen or more new stars blazed briefly. Then the combined might of hundreds of Posleen ships poured down onto the PDB, blasting it to ruin, raising a mushroom cloud, and even shaking Hans as he stood in his hatch atop Anna’s turret.
We are hurting them, maybe even hurting them badly. But it won’t be enough.
As if in confirmation, a veritable torrent of Posleen fire poured through down from the heavens to fall somewhere far to the west.
That would be for the benefit of the French, I think.
Ouvrage du Hackenberg (Fortress Hackenberg), Thierville, Maginot Line, France, 18 December 2007
Not for the first time, Major General Henri Merle cursed his government’s pigheaded refusal to cooperate with anyone. On the remote television screen that adorned one wall of his command post he saw a nightmare he had somehow hoped he would never see again, a sea of reptilian centaurs chewing through wire, mines, and machine gun and artillery fire to get at the defenders. The actinic glare of the Posleen railguns crossed over and through the red tracers of France’s last defenders.
The command post shook slightly with the steady vibrations of the fort’s three automatic cannon firing from their retractable turrets. On the screen the fire of the short-range guns, short ranged because the turrets were too small to permit much recoil, drew lines of mushrooming black clouds through the enemy host, leaving thousands of destroyed Posleen bodies in their wake. Each gun was capable of sending forth several dozen one-hundred-thirty-five-millimeter shells per minute by virtue of their unique chain-driven feeding system. All of that was done automatically except for feeding of the shells into the conveyor system that hoisted them aloft. That job was done by dozens of sweating, straining men in ammunition chambers far below.
We built this thing to deter the Germans from attacking straight into our industrial heartland, mused Merle, with a grin. We succeeded too. They obliged us by going through Belgium instead. Then we kept the forts up in pretty pristine condition for twenty years in case the Russians decided to get jolly. Maybe it really did help deter them too, never know. Now finally we are using them, after a frantic race to restore them, to hang on to this last corner of la belle patrie.