“I mention this, lord, because tomorrow is the supreme holy day of the dominant cluster of religious groups on the planet. ‘Christmas,’ they call it. I believe that translates as ‘Solemn celebration of the birth of the anointed one.’ They give gifts to each other, sing songs of praise and thanksgiving to their god, gather to worship, and decorate their dwellings and places of labor with special care.”
Athenalras shrugged. “What does this mean to us?”
“Oh, perhaps nothing, lord. I simply found it interesting.”
“Maybe so,” said Athenalras, indifferently. “What news of the front?”
“Not good, my lord,” admitted Ro’moloristen. “In the north and south there is no progress. The People have run into the great ditch the thresh call the ‘Rhein’ and found no crossings. They shudder under the lash of the thresh’s artillery on the near bank. In the center, news is somewhat better. Only a few of the forts of the string of defenses they call ‘Maginot’ still hold out. In some places, those where there is more than one such fort close together, the People suffer fearfully from the fire of nearby fortresses. But that is only in a few places. The other forts are all being reduced or already have been.”
“Good,” grunted the senior God King.
“Yes… well, yes and no, lord. Most of the thresh seem to have escaped through the next line of defenses in the center area. We have little more than our own dead to feed the host, though there are enough of those to feed them for some time. And the People attacking those other defenses, the line they call ‘Siegfried,’ are being chewed up rather badly. In is the same story in the east. Between rivers and fortifications we are paying a fearful price with little to show for it.”
“What of the space-to-surface bombardment?” asked Athenalras.
“Less effective against the line ‘Siegfried’ than it was against the line ‘Maginot,’ lord. This second line is built differently; smaller fortifications, and nearer to the surface. On the whole it has been a waste to risk a ship to come low enough to fire on single, small bunkers. There is some… thing out there which has been picking off the lower orbit vessels of the People; picking them off and then moving to a new firing position. The firing signature of this thing is the same as for one of our own ship-borne, kinetic energy weapons.”
Athenalras grew even more somber at this news. “How many of these ‘things’ are there?”
“No way to tell, lord. There could be many. There could be only the one.”
“I wonder what new ‘gifts’ the threshkreen will have for us on the morrow, on their ‘Christmas.’ ”
Chapter 13
Tiger Anna, South of Magdeberg,
Germany, 25 December 2007
Behind Hans the sunless, predawn, sky flickered as if lit by a thousand strobe lights; the entire artillery — over three thousand guns — of Army Group Reserve, sending their gifts to the Posleen dug in well south of the city.
The city itself was holding out still, most likely because fully half the Posleen that could have attacked it were instead facing southward against the looming threat of Army Group Reserve. Even so, the town was hard-pressed and begging frantically for succor from Mühlenkampf. The “gifts” to the Posleen were also a gift to Magdeberg’s defenders, heartfelt gifts sent with the promise of many more to come.
Schultz, not needed at his gunner’s station for the nonce, helped bring round the morning’s repast, a couple of hard-boiled eggs, some long-shelf-life milk — “nuclear milk,” the men called it — a roll and some sort of unmentionable meat, a grayish, greasy, half-inch-thick slab of embalmed beef. Brasche, concentrating on the intelligence updates coming in via radio, absentmindedly took the eggs, roll and meat, but pointedly refused the milk. Schultz could not blame him; the price of extending the shelf life was milk that tasted of old gym socks. Nutritious it may have been. Good, it was not.
“Gut,” — good — Hans muttered. The enemy were apparently not lifting their ships in an attempt to silence the army’s batteries, or — at least — not yet.
The artillery was forced to fire into an intelligence void, to a great extent. Nothing humanly or remotely piloted was able to survive for more than the instant it took to be destroyed if they attempted flying above or even near the Posleen. Not one human-built satellite survived in space to look down upon the enemy. No human-piloted space-going vessel could hope to approach Earth, with the fleet largely destroyed and the few, wounded survivors huddled and licking their wounds somewhere in the direction of Proxima Centauri. A Himmit ship might have done some real good, had one been available. Sadly, none were.
What could be done had been and was being. Florian Geyer had done everything humanly possible to get through the Posleen perimeter — tried everything, paid in full measure, and failed to do more than define the edges of that perimeter. A few towns within the area of infestation held out yet; these provided a little local intelligence — telling as much where the enemy was not as where he was — for the gunners to use in targeting. The maps also told a bit, though given the aliens’ very different military philosophy from that of their human opponents, Hans was skeptical of the value of map reconnaissance. The Posleen just didn’t think like human beings.
The most valuable recon assets in the Germans’ hands were artillery-fired television cameras encased in time-fused shells that gave anywhere from a few to fifteen minutes of visual insight before falling too low to do any good. These were rare items, however. Like the precious neutron bombs, there had not been time to build many of them. They were also used, generally speaking, in conjunction with the artillery-fired neutron bombs, the cameras spotting useful targets and the atomic weapons then “servicing” those targets.
The problem was, though — as Hans knew, that the enemy had had a chance to spread out and dig in. There were few concentrations, few that the cameras had found anyway, that justified the use of the deadly little enhanced radiation packages. Moreover, one of the genuinely effective defenses against the brief burst of high-intensity neutrons the bombs emitted upon detonation was simple earth; and the Posleen had dug in deep in the few days granted them.
Meanwhile, Magdeberg — and Berlin, past that — called frantically and continuously for aid.
Federal Chancellery, Berlin, Germany, 25 December 2007
The chancellor looked over the situation displayed on one of the three view-screens that filled one wall of his deep underground office. In blues and reds this screen showed graphically the state both of the defending forces, in blue, and the aliens, in red, infesting Germany and pressing at her borders. He had been satisfied, over the last two days, to see two of the large red splotches disappear as Army Group Reserve under Mühlenkampf eliminated all but one of the landings south and southeast of Magdeberg. Other, local, reserves had seen to some few others.
Matched against the good news, however, was a pile of bad. The Siegfried line in the west defending the Rhein and the Rheinland was holding, true. But casualties were atrocious, indentations had been made, and the state of resupply, given how many Posleen-controlled areas lay athwart supply routes, was perilous.
In the east things were worse, much worse. The Vistula line was simply crumbling and, nightmare of nightmares, the enemy had managed to seize at least one bridge over the river at Warsaw.