There was little left of the center of the tiny, picturesque farming town of Grosslangheim once Brünnhilde had backed through. The shock of the impacting KE projectile shook the rest of the town to its foundations.
Rinteel, too, was shaken and sweat-soaked. He had been somewhat untroubled by the occasional sniping Brünnhilde had done early on. He simply did not consider, would not let himself consider, the sentient beings on the receiving end. Brunhilde’s railgun simply launched projectiles into space or sky and that was the end of it, as far as the Indowy’s mind would permit.
The material coming back, “incoming” as the human crew said, was another matter entirely. Brünnhilde picked up, but deamplified, the thunderous crashing. So too, she gave the crew, at reduced sound levels, the sense of impact when a KE projectile hit. The tank could do nothing to reduce the shaking and rocking of the tank from a near miss; the Indowy found himself tossed and bruised by the ill-fitting straps of his battle station.
“I’ve got a hydraulic leak in right track section three,” Mueller announced. “Not bad but increasing. Inboard.”
“Rinteel, see to it. Schmidt, go with him and assist.”
Ignoring the two-being human and Indowy team unbuckling themselves and crawling along the floor of the tank to an access panel that led below, Prael asked, “Reinhard, have you got target on that fucker yet?”
“Just a second… coming… almost… AHA!” Brünnhilde shuddered again with the release of another KE round. Instantly the hydraulic elevator and rammer fed another round to the railgun’s launch rack. Schlüssel waited for the fiery bloom that confirmed a hit before firing another round.
Already Prael was searching the sky for another target for his gunner.
Below the tank, the cobblestone streets of Grosslangheim cracked and splintered.
Mainz, Germany, 15 January 2008
Roman soldiers and citizens had once walked the city’s streets. Feudal knights had held tourneys for her folks’ entertainment. Gutenberg, of movable type fame, had been born and raised there. Smashed in the Second World War, modern Mainz, still retaining much of its medieval charm, had arisen, phoenixlike, from its ruins.
Mainz would never rise again. Blasted by everything from space-borne kinetic energy weapons, to ground-mounted and carried arms, to human artillery fired in support of its recent defenders, the city was nothing more than a ruin of ruins. Soon enough, the Posleen harvesting machine would erase even those. Gutenberg’s ghost would wander in vain looking for a landmark. Roman soldiers and feudal knights, peasants and burghers, artists and artisans; no trace would remain, all would be forgotten.
Through the streets, dodging and flowing around the chunks of ruined buildings littering them, the Posleen horde marched like a flood. Above, silently, the tenar of their God Kings hovered, ever alert for threshkreen holdouts. There were a few of these, men deliberately left behind or detached from their units and lost amongst the ruins. But so few remained that each shot was met with a torrent of fire; plasma cannon, railgun, even high-velocity missile.
From time to time a storm of shells would fall upon the remnants of a major intersection to splash some small part of the Posleen river like a creek struck with a rock. But, as with water, the Posleen always closed up and continued their flow. There might be thresh ahead, after all.
Mainz — ancient Mainz, human Mainz — was fast disappearing under the yellow tide.
Wiesbaden, Germany, 15 January 2008
What might have been an easy half day’s march, Mainz to Wiesbaden, for seasoned infantry in good order, with an open road, had been a nightmare trudge lasting the better part of five days for the masses of panic-stricken civilians, mostly Germans mixed with lesser numbers of French.
Each night Isabelle and her remaining son had gone to sleep — such miserable, fitful, half-frozen sleep — wherever fate had brought them to that point. Only mutual body heat and the thick blankets Isabelle had ported had kept them alive. Of food there had been none after the bits Isabelle had carried, long since exhausted. Of water there had been little beyond chewed dirty snow and the occasional muddy, chemical-tasting pool or crater. Even Germans required time to plan such a move, she thought, not without a sense of bitter vindication.
But that sense of vindication could not last, not faced with the generosity of the Wiesbadeners who opened their hearts, their homes, and — best of all — their food lockers to the passing refugees. With a belly full, her youngest baby cradled in her arms, in a warm bed in a heated home, with the Rhine River and an army between her and the aliens, Isabelle felt safe for the first time since leaving Hackenberg.
Only recurring nightmares about her other son disturbed her sleep.
Closer to his mother than either of them would have believed possible, Volunteer De Gaullejac, his sergeant, and the battered remnants of their platoon kept watch from a stout stone building looking over the bridge crossing the Rhein. Young Thomas had never imagined such a sea of humanity as he had seen crossing the bridge.
The platoon’s job, as part of the company, was to ensure that the bridge did not fall into alien hands. None spoke of it, yet each man knew what it meant. If the aliens showed up it did not matter who was on the bridge — French, German or the Papal Guard, it must be dropped.
Thomas was not sure he could. After all, his mother and little brother might be among those thronging to safety.
A flight of half a dozen tenar, the aliens’ flying machines, appeared over the water heading for the friendly side of the bridge.
“They must have slipped around the defenders on the far side,” muttered Gribeauval.
The aliens stopped over the river, open targets for all to see and all within range to engage, and turned their weapons on the thronging masses of noncombatants on the bridge.
“Don’t shoot boys,” Gribeauval ordered. “Let the others handle it. Those aliens are trying to get us to open up. If they do, they’ll swarm us, most likely, and the bridge won’t be dropped.”
Even as the sergeant spoke, from his peephole Thomas saw one of the aliens thrown from his flying sled to fall, arms and legs waving frantically, to the cold waters below. The remainder of the aliens continued to rake the refugees with railgun fire.
Even at this distance, Thomas could faintly make out the shrieks and cries of terror of the civilians under attack. He saw more bodies, human ones, fall to the water. Some, so it seemed from the way they clawed at air on the way down, jumped to certain death rather than stand one more minute helpless under Posleen fire.
The boy prayed that his mother and little brother had already passed safely.
Tiger Anna, Oder-Niesse line, 16 January 2008
A few refugees, slow but lucky, still managed to worm their way through Posleen lines and make their stumbling passage across the charred-body choked cookhouse that was the Niesse River. Hans had, for a while, sent patrols across to meet and guide any that could be found to safety on the western bank. Casualties among the patrols, however, had been fierce. Within days he had had to order the practice stopped. Any civilians that could find their way across would be welcome. But he would risk no more men on such a fruitless task.