The story of how this had happened was somewhat confused. As near as could be determined, though, a great flood of humanity had been on the bridge in desperate flight when the Posleen first appeared. Unwilling, or perhaps unable, to commit mass murder by blowing the bridge, the defenders had delayed just a bit too long. The enemy’s flyers had massed and blasted the defending demolition guard to ruin before the bridge could be dropped. A hasty counterattack was put in using whatever was locally available. That having failed, however, and the aliens pouring across at the rate of several hundred thousand per hour, the German and Polish formations strung out along the river were about to be forced into conducting a desperate fighting withdrawal to the Oder-Niesse line.
And the Oder-Niesse line is less than a sham, thought the chancellor. There are few heavy fortifications. Those that exist are very old and weak and were low priority for renovation in any case. The river itself is as little as three feet deep in places. And even where it is deep enough to drown the bastards there are places where it has frozen over.
Tearing his eyes from the distressing display, the chancellor turned to his senior soldier, Field Marshal von Seydlitz. “Kurt?” he asked, “Is there a chance we can hold the river? Regain the bridge?”
“Essentially none, sir,” Seydlitz responded, wearily. He was about a week behind on sleep. “I had considered that the neutron weapons might make a difference. But my nuclear weapons staff has pointed out two distressing facts. One is that we have only half a dozen of the things close enough to get in range to be fired at the crossing. The other is that the bombs work best with a highly concentrated area target. The Posleen are concentrating before crossing, true. But once they reach this side they are dispersing very rapidly. Moreover, those actually on the bridge at any given time represent a very unremunerative linear target. We might kill as few as twenty thousand per round among those who have already crossed, perhaps five or six thousand of those actually on the bridge. We can eliminate anything up to one million by hitting the far side with all six weapons.”
Seydlitz sighed. “The General Staff calculates that this will slow them down by perhaps an hour. Herr Kanzler, the hour saved now is not as important as holding the Oder-Niesse line later. We will need those weapons then.”
“The Oder-Niesse line?” asked the chancellor.
“It isn’t much but it’s all we have,” answered Seydlitz.
“Give the orders. Fall back. Cover the retreat of as many Polish civilians as possible.”
Seydlitz nodded an acknowledgment, then continued. “We’re still going to lose many of the troops and by the time they reach the Oder they may be nothing much more than a demoralized rabble for a while… but I agree we should run while we can.
“But, Herr Kanzler, we have another problem, though it is an indirect one and won’t become insurmountable until the Siegfried line collapses.”
“The Rhein bridges?” asked the chancellor.
“Yes, sir. For now the enemy who seized both sides of the bridges from above is staying put. But they have infested an area of more than twenty-five kilometers radius, are digging in frantically, and are seriously inconveniencing supply to the men on the Siegfried line covering the Rheinland.”
“Recommendations?”
“Halt Army Group Reserve in place. Let them reorganize and shift them around. Then throw them at that landing.”
The chancellor thought, weighing options. Though he had done his military time as a young man he was no soldier and knew it. He was, however, a supreme and — at need — a supremely ruthless politician; his resurrection of the SS showed that.
“No,” he answered. “if Berlin falls so soon it will take the heart out of our people. Let local forces contain the landing athwart the Rhein. After Army Group Reserve has cleared out Saxony-Anhalt, Pomerania and Mecklenberg we can turn them around. But for now? No.”
South of Magdeberg, Germany, 25 December 2007
The artillery storm was not abating. Even so, unnoticed, it was lifting from over eleven narrow preplanned axes. Indeed, the axes were so narrow that the shell-shocked Posleen cowering there barely noticed any change in the pummeling they were receiving.
Under the lash of the guns, terrified Posleen, normals and God Kings both, huddled and trembled. Never in all their previous history had the People experienced anything against which they were so completely helpless as they were against this threshkreen “artillery.”
Worst of all, no place and no being was safe. Oolt’ondai Chaleeniskeeren, as much as the lowest of his oolt’os, shivered and quivered and quaked in a bunker fronting the bay of a trench at each near miss. Unable even to eat of the thresh’c’olt, the Posleen iron rations, brought to him by a cosslain, the God King alternately cursed the cowardly thresh who infested this world and the fate that had brought him and his people here.
The Posleen knew he could have taken his tenar and climbed above the shell storm. The problem with that was a certain number of the enemy’s projectiles operated off of electronic fuses that were perfectly capable of being set off by the near presence of a tenar. Reports from Posleen refugees from the south made this abundantly clear; the sky was no safe place to be when the threshkreen unleashed their unholy storm.
Thus, the tenar of each God King, as much as the God King himself, lay vulnerable in hastily dug holes in the ground. Chaleeniskeeren’s, or what was left of it, lay ruined in its hole a few strides away. Idly, the Posleen wondered how many of the tenar would be left riderless by the barrage, even while other God Kings were left with ruined transportation. Robbed of their flyers, much of the host’s power would be lost.
The ships were safe enough from most artillery. Built of materials thick and strong, they shrugged off all but the worst of the threshkreen’s projectiles. What they could not shrug off were the radiation-emitting weapons. These turned the very metal of the ships into radioactive poison. Within the effective radius of those weapons the end, even for those in the ships, was only a matter of time, that… and shitting, puking, twitching agony. Fortunately, the thresh seemed to have few of them.
The artillery impacting near Chaleeniskeeren lifted off and began to strike another area. It had done so half a dozen times before. The first few times it had lifted, the Posleen had rushed for firing bays and tenar. Then it had returned, slaughtering them like abat. Now the lifting was cause for nothing more than a brief sigh of very temporary relief, not for exposing themselves.
Chaleeniskeeren couldn’t help the nagging feeling that the threshkreen were actually training him to stay put when the fire lifted.
Though half deafened by the shelling, Chaleeniskeeren felt rather than heard a strange rumbling coming through the ground. Shelling or not, trained by the thresh to stay put in the relative safety of the bunker or not, the rumbling was too strange, too out of his experience, not to investigate.
Lowering his head to squeeze under the bunker’s low door, the God King stepped out into the bay of the trench and risked looking out into the smoky haze.
Nothing, nothing but craters and smoke.
And then he saw it, a low-lying predatory shape, moving cautiously on treads through the haze, an angular projection on top swinging its main weapon right and left, searching for prey. Soon the first shape was joined by another, then a third and fourth. Wide eyed, the God King saw thresh on foot scattered among the larger shapes. He watched, shocked, for but a moment before raising the shout, “To arms! To arms! The threshkreen are upon us!”