Any refugee that was hit was left for dead; the enemy’s railguns destroyed mere flesh beyond hope of recovery. An occasional pistol shot sounding from the rear announced those few occasions when a straggler, or a wounded refugee, was given a final mercy.
Captain Hennessey led the way, one of his sergeants bringing up the rear of the column. Isabelle’s long, child-dragging strides would have placed her beside him if she had permitted it. Even the desire to get herself and her boys safely away from even random enemy fire was not great enough to make her willing to foul herself by proximity to the French SS man, however. She did find she was close enough to hear him speak into the radio from time to time, and even to hear what was said to him.
The news from that radio was frightening: reports of death, destruction and defeat as the covering battalion from Division Charlemagne was decimated and driven back, again and again, by the massive alien assault. Some of the news made Hennessey stiffen with pain, she could see. Some made his chest swell with pride and his bearing assume a regal posture to match her own.
Once, perhaps, she saw him reach up to wipe something from the general vicinity of his eyes.
The sounds of fighting, distant but growing closer, put speed to the refugees’ feet. The overflight of artillery grew, if anything, more intense as Charlemagne’s soldiers, much reduced in numbers, were forced to call for and depend on it more with each lost man and combat vehicle.
At length, Isabelle saw Hennessey relax. The German border was in sight.
He was met by another soldier in the field gray of the more traditional German regular army, the Bundeswehr. Briefly, she wondered if there would be some scene of hostility between the two, coming from different services and even different nations. But, no, the two met as if long-lost brothers, placing hands on shoulders and shaking hands briskly, illuminating the scene with gleaming smiles.
An old woman with a timid smile came up to Isabelle, drawn apparently by the younger woman’s shining inner strength. “Madame?” the older one asked, “what is going to be done with us? Where shall we go, what shall we do?”
“That is a very good question, madame,” Isabelle answered. “Let me go and find out.”
With that, Isabelle forced down her disgust. In truth, that was somehow easier now than she would have expected. Dragging her two children behind her, she walked directly up to Hennessey and the German. Then she stopped and asked the men the same questions.
The German answered, in rather cultured French, actually, “From here, you will be billeted temporarily in some of the public buildings in Saarlouis. We are arranging food and bedding, medical care too, but it will take a little time and you may spend the night hungry and cold. We did not expect this, you see.”
“I see,” she said, quietly then paused to think. Behind her the long snaking column of refugees advanced miserably through a fairly narrow marked lane. A loudspeaker announced, in appallingly bad French she thought, that the refugees must stay within the markings as the land to either side was heavily mined. He also began to announce the same message the German had given to Isabelle, so she thought no more about the old woman.
For reasons she could not articulate, she resisted joining the stream and stayed there by the side of the French and German officers, watching that human flood pass by.
Eventually Hennessey said, “You really should go on, madame. Please, do. Take your children to safety.” To the German he said, “And Karl, you have everything well in hand here. I have things to do.”
She nodded once, briskly, then turned and with the boys began the fearful trudge through that narrow lane in the broad belt of death. She never saw the look of farewell the German gave to the Frenchman. She might not have understood it if she had.
Isabelle was worried at first if the Germans had really gotten all of the mines out of the way. The thought of stepping on one, worse, of one of her babies stepping on one, send a tremor through her. Then, she consoled herself with the knowledge that the Germans, give the Boche their due, were a very thorough people; that, and that failure to make the trip would see her and her babies eaten.
She enjoyed French cuisine of course; she had no desire to become it.
Past the fields of mines, Isabelle glanced to left and right. Her eyes began to pick out details, a solid-looking slab of concrete here, a vicious-looking barbed wire obstacle there. Three times she passed artillery batteries firing furiously. She had never in her life imagined such a painful torrent of sheer sound.
Kraus-Maffei-Wegmann Plant,
Munich, Germany, 21 December 2007
“God, isn’t she the sweetest sounding thing you’ve ever heard,” whispered Mueller, though the intercom from his drive station.
“What do you mean?” asked Schlüssel. “This lovely bitch makes no sound at all except for the tracks.”
Mueller laughed. “I know, my friend. And had you spent any time in panzers you would know how sweet a sound silence can be.”
The positions they had chosen for themselves were somewhat contralogical. At least they were not the obvious ones. Though Mueller and Schlüssel had worked in the design team, respectively, on gun and drive train, Mueller’s army experience as a driver and Schlüssel’s Navy experience as a gunnery officer had put them back in those positions. Breitenbach had no military experience whatsoever but had worked on both armor and close-in defense weapons in the design team. Thus he took command of those and of the half dozen factory workers who had volunteered to run them. Henschel was old, and though one could never have imagined him as loader on a conventional tank he was more than capable of running the automated feed system of any Tiger. A nuclear specialist, Seidl, one of those who had installed the Tiger’s pebble-bed reactors, was in charge of power. One of the factory concession cafeteria workers volunteered to run the small kitchen and double as a secondary gunner. Lastly, Prael, because he knew the AI package to perfection, and because Tiger IIIB relied heavily on its AI, was selected by acclaim to command the tank.
Indowy Rinteel, who was not a member of the crew, felt a strange sadness, and — more than a sense of loss — a sense of something missing from his own makeup. These humans were so strange. They had treated him very kindly from the beginning. No, “kind” was not all. They had been tactful, enough so that he was sometimes almost comfortable among them, despite their size and flashing canines.
Kind and tactful, both, they had been; gentle almost as the Indowy themselves were gentle. Yet, apparently gleefully, they were preparing to go forth to kill and, likely, to die. Rinteel could understand the willingness to die for one’s people. He had come to Earth knowing that, in attempting to sabotage Darhel plans he might well be caught and killed.
What he didn’t understand was this ability to kill. Alone among the known denizens of the galaxy only the humans and the Posleen shared this unfortunate ability. Didn’t they see how it imperiled their souls as individuals?
Or, perhaps, did the humans see? Did they see and decide that, some things were not only worth dying for, they were worth damnation for? It had to be thought on.