He reached the thick steel doors at the end of the corridor and stood on something, a concrete block Isabelle assumed it was, perhaps one that held up one of the great steel doors. In clear French the man announced, “I am Captain Jean Hennessey of the 37th SS Panzer Grenadier Division, Charlemagne, and I am here to lead you to safety.
“This fortress is going to fall very soon. Even now the rest of my battalion is taking up position to hold the crest and the interior of the fort as long as possible to allow all of you — as many of you as possible — the chance to escape. We are going to have about a twelve-mile walk from here to a place where we can cross German lines. You represent food to the aliens, so they will try to cut down any they can to feed themselves once we are gone from the cover of this fortress. My battalion will do all it can to prevent that. Once we are out of enemy range, the battalion will execute a fighting withdrawal to cover your escape.”
Though a scion of royalty, Isabelle’s politics had always been far to the left of center. She wanted desperately to shout Hennessey down, to curse him and the hated and hateful insignia he wore. But then the tug of one of her boys on her arm made her reconsider. She could not risk angering one who might be their salvation.
Interlude
Even Athenalras, no stranger to slaughter, was visibly subdued as he heard the reports of the massacre of his people as they attempted to drive forward across the entire front. He had always believed that numbers — numbers and courage — more than anything else decided fate on the Path of Fury, that mass above all would stagger and crush the enemy.
But the only thing staggering about his numbers were the numbers of the People he had lost. Their bodies draped like decorations upon the wire and ground all across the front. In psychic agony, for the Posleen leader did care for his people as a whole — if not so much for individuals, Athenalras’ crest sagged. The tenar-mounted God Kings had suffered no less than the mass of the People attacking on foot. The loss of so many sons was like an icy blade plunged deep into Athenalras’ bowels. “There are not enough tears to mourn the dead,” he exclaimed. “I want to call off this attack.”
“It is their blasted fortifications,” Ro’moloristen said, bitter, helpless fury boiling in his heart. “From this miserable hole called Liege, to another place they call Eben Emael, to here facing this Maginot line, we are trying to break their weapons by hurling bodies at them.”
“Can we get through? In the end, can we beat our way through?” asked Athenalras.
The young God King’s crest erected. “We can, my lord; we must! For something is becoming ever more clear. If we do not exterminate this species it will exterminate us! They are too good, too brave and above all too clever. With fewer numbers and worse weapons, infiltrated and betrayed by their political leadership, attacked with devastating power from space, they are still nearly a match for us. I have some sympathy for these thresh, yes, a degree of admiration, too. But give them as little as ten years of peace and the existence of these thresh dooms our people.”
Chapter 12
Headquarters, Army Group Reserve,
Kapellendorf Castle, Thuringia, 20 December 2007
Afraid even to whisper it, Mühlenkampf could not help but think, We’re doomed.
In the end, though they had hurt the Posleen fleet badly, the Planetary Defense Batteries, even supplemented by salvaged railguns, had failed. Mühlenkampf had known they would. Their presumptive failure had be the major reason behind the creation of Army Group Reserve in the first place.
The landings had begun. Reports came of at least fifteen apparently major landings across Germany and Poland, along with hundreds of minor ones. The total numbers of enemy on the ground was staggering. Mühlenkampf’s intelligence officer estimated that the total numbers were in the scores of millions.
Germany and what remained of Poland were in danger of being literally inundated under an alien flood.
In some places that flood was being controlled. Newly developed weapons had their influence, chief among them the neutron bombs that the extreme left would never have permitted had they been allowed continued influence. And, though there were never enough of them — there had not been time to build enough of them — and though they were not always in the right place to be used, even so, the enhanced radiation weapons left whole swathes of the enemy puking and dying at many of the landing sites.
The enhanced radiation weapons, “neutron bombs” they were often called, were actually a regressive technological step in weapons development. They differed from more usual nuclear weapons only in not having the heavy uranium shell fitted around the central fissile core that made the nukes so much more powerful, blast-wise, than their predecessors. The uranium shell enhanced this blast by containing and harnessing the neutron emissions of that core.
But the neutrons, unharnessed, were deadly enough in their own right. Emerging from the relatively small blast they acted like tiny bits of shrapnel, passing through bodies and killing the cells they passed through. Enough of them passing through a healthy human would kill within minutes. Moreover the death was miserably demoralizing to any who saw it and lived. Even at a considerable distance they would kill in anything from hours to days. Those deaths were more wretched still.
Best of all, the smaller blast did less physical damage and left comparatively little residual radiation. Indeed, only where it struck steel or a steel alloy did the neutrons create a long-term radiation hazard, by making the metal itself give off gamma radiation.
One bomb — a single one-hundred-fifty-five-millimeter shell — used timely, was said to have killed as many as one hundred thousand Posleen within twenty minutes of its detonation. Scores of ships had been captured intact, though highly radioactive, at that one site. Moreover, casualties in the nearby civilian towns had been negligible, as had environmental damage.
Some Posleen the neutron bombs were not needed to destroy. One of the Posleen landings, for example, had had the misfortune of coming down between Erfurt and Weimar; smack in the middle of Army Group Reserve. The aliens’ resistance there had been both brief and futile.
Despite these little successes, Mühlenkampf still thought, we’re doomed.
“Well, first things first,” he announced to his staff. “And the first thing is to smash through to Berlin to relieve both its defenders and its people. On the way I want to eliminate the alien infestation between Magdeberg, Dessau and Halle. Then we’ll spread out to clear up the area behind the Vistula line. There’s not much between Berlin and Schleswig-Holstein, so the Berliners should be able to make out on their own if they have to withdraw later.”
Siegfried Line, Germany, 21 December 2007
It had been a nightmare for Isabelle, her two sons, and the thousands of other refugees fleeing the Posleen onslaught with them. Emerging for the first time in weeks from embattled and falling Fort Hackenberg, she had been immediately plunged into a very close simulacrum of hell. All around, seemingly at random, fell horrid, frightening bolts from the sky. To their din was added the freight train rattle of German and French artillery passing overhead. Behind her, muffled by the high ground, the torrent of human artillery lashing out from the fortress and other places to rip at the enemy was like a distant but ferocious thunderstorm. Ahead of her, the ground had been plowed and beaten into a moonscape. Also from behind came the occasional flash of a Posleen railgun round striking down at the refugees.