A few slaps across the face raised Dieter to a semblance of awareness.
“Back to your station, old son, while I check on the commander.”
With the groggy Schultz climbing back into his gunner’s station, and the main battery about to be, hopefully, functional, Harz went on to the second priority — the commander.
Brasche was already awakening against the bulkhead of the inner fighting compartment when Harz reached him. Harz saw the commander’s arm hanging at an odd angle, red fluid leaking through his uniform, and a red stream pouring from his head to cover his face and trickle onto the deck. “Casualties?” Hans croaked.
“Dunno, sir,” replied Harz. “No report.”
The brigade Ib, or logistics officer, arising from the tank’s deck and climbing back into his secondary gunner’s station under his own power, took one look at his screen and answered, “Heavy, sir. Very heavy, especially among the Tigers. I see five of them flashing black on my screen. Though whether they are dead or dying or what I cannot tell. And I suspect our panzer grenadiers will be in worse shape. The artillery seems to have come through well enough.”
“Damn,” said the stunned Brasche, in a weak voice.
Interlude
“I have had enough!” exclaimed Athenalras. “Call off this multi-damned, demon-spawned attack.”
“My lord, no!” shouted Ro’moloristen, though the carnage along the front sickened him no less than his elder. “We cannot stop now! Think, my lord. The thresh are reeling in the east. And there is barely an obstacle to our brethren’s continued progress into the very heart of this ‘Deutschland.’ ”
Ro’moloristen lowered his head and shook his crest. “The line ‘Siegfried’ is brittle, lord, brittle. Though the People may fall at a rate of twenty to one in chewing through it, fifty to one, one hundred to one — even, as we are in some places, it matters not. For we outnumber the thresh still by a factor of three hundred to one or more on this front.
“And, lord, the bridge the host of Arlingas has captured near the gray thresh town of Mannheim? It is impacting severely on their ability to keep their damnable artillery resupplied. Even in the last few rotations of this planet our losses to this arm along that portion of the front have gone down drastically. Projections are that if we keep up the pressure, the threshkreen must break.”
Sadly, the senior laid one hand upon the very much junior’s shoulder. “Let all this be true, young one. Still, I am sick of the slaughter. And would that it might end.”
“There can be no end, great one. Not until this species is utterly cast down. Come see.”
Gently, the junior led his lord to a data screen. “See the projections, lord.” Quickly the screen jumped through well calculated close estimates of such things as population growth, technological progress, urbanization, advances in the military art, even psychiatric profiles of humans under stress.
“As you can see, lord, our muzzles are plainly hitched to the breeding post.”
Athenalras answered, slowly and deliberately, “We are being well and truly fucked anyway, young one. We have tossed away the flower of the People in futile assaults against this Siegfried line, and have gained nothing by it except to reduce our numbers by one hundred million on this front alone.”
“I know, lord,” said Ro’moloristen. “I know. But I have been thinking…”
“A dangerous pastime.”
“Yes, lord, I know that, too. Nonetheless I have been thinking. We… the People as a whole… make war as we hunt. These threshkreen do not. Or, at least, they do not do so as we do. They have what they call ‘Principles of War.’ The lists of these principles vary among them but I have discovered twelve that seem to cover everything.”
“Twelve?”
“Yes, Lord: they are Mass, Objective, Security, Surprise, Maneuver, Offensive, Unity of Command, Simplicity, Economy of Force, Attrition, Annihilation and Shape. Using these principles I have determined upon a plan that may grant us the victory. Instead of attacking all along the front, we will concentrate our efforts towards the sector nearest to the bridge held by the host of Arlingas. We have no clue how even to use any of the thresh artillery we have captured, let alone build or resupply our own. But we do have ships. From space we will pound — ”
“They will butcher our ships in space!”
Ro’moloristen gave the Posleen equivalent of a sigh. “Yes, lord, surely they will, for a while. But before our ships are destroyed they will, in turn, kill. They will beat for us a flat road through a narrow lane in the Siegfried line.”
“Lord, if we don’t our people are dead!”
Coming to a sudden decision, Athenalras lifted his crest slightly. “Show me the projections of loss,” he demanded.
Athenalras looked over Ro’moloristen’s figures. Frightful, frightful. And yet the puppy is right. What else can we do, if the People are not to perish? “It will take several revolutions of this planet about its axis for us to prepare. See to it. And prepare a special hunting group of ships to see to this reported super-tenaral. And reduce the level of the current offensive to no more than is needed to keep the thresh’s attention.”
Part IV
Chapter 14
Tiger Brünnhilde, Hanau, Germany, 1 January 2008
“Oh, God, I’ll never drink schnapps again,” moaned Mueller from underneath bloodshot eyes.
“Stop making so much damned noise, Johann,” insisted Prael. “We’re all as hung over as you.”
“Franz and I are not,” insisted Schlüssel. “Neither is Herr Henschel. With age comes a certain wisdom and restraint, after all.”
“My little round ass,” answered Breitenbach, blearily. “You three packed it away as well as any of us. You have just had more years to get in training.”
The combat compartment of the tank grew silent with that, largely out of deference to the “dying.”
For ten days Prael had run the crew through drill after drill, simulated engagement after simulated engagement. Occasionally, when circumstances seemed right, they had taken a potshot at an unwary Posleen vessel passing overhead. Already Schlüssel had painted six kill markers around the lower part of the railguns rail, mute but eloquent testimony to the efficacy of the railgun, even against Posleen ships in orbit.
Ten days and six kills. It would have been an utterly and futilely short period of training but for two factors. The first of these was the tank’s AI; which had both reduced the need for training and made whatever training was given precisely appropriate need.
But the second factor was within the purview of the more subtle part of training: building comradeship. And years of working together, designing and building the two versions of Tiger, had long since welded the men, and one woman, who crewed Brünnhilde into a team. They knew each other, had eaten and drank together. They knew each other’s families, and hopes and dreams. They cared.
Though they didn’t talk much about dreams.
Though he liked these humans, especially the one with the funny bumps, so reminiscent of Brünnhilde’s armored front, who usually made them their food, Rinteel did not feel a part of the team, not even as the token Nibelung, whatever a Nibelung was.