“Stupid fucking bullshit, is what it is. Why I ever joined this outfit — ”
“Chin? What’s wrong, Chin?” asked Finnegan.
For a worrisome moment, the private said nothing. When he did it was simply to say, in stunned surprise, “Corporal, you need to see this.”
Railing softly about pain in the ass rankers, Finnegan bounded over, weaving around the trees, until he stood beside the private, his head sticking just over the rise.
“Oh, shit,” the corporal said quietly.
In the valley below, thousands upon thousands of them, so thick that Finnegan couldn’t even see the ground, the Posleen host was rising to its feet, the tenar-riding God Kings pointing and gesturing to the pair of ACS troopers.
Even as the first railgun rounds began to chew the ground and trees around them, Finnegan ordered, “RUNNN!”
Connors went instantly white, no mean feat given the amount of sunbathing he had done in the months before the Posleen landed. He didn’t have to inform Suarez what Finnegan and Chin had found. The suit’s communicator squawked loudly enough for the colonel to hear for himself.
“Posleen… zillions of ’em… in the valley at Objective Robin… we’re running… they’re pursuing… shit! Chin’s down.”
Another voice: “It ain’t just Finnegan, Boss. We got us about forty thousand of the bastards at Objective Tiger.”
Another voice: “Can’t run, Cap’n Connors. We’re pinned. I can’t tell you how many. More’n… aiiiii!”
Another voice… another voice… another voice.
Connors looked up at Suarez, standing in the hatch of his track. You’re the chief, Colonel. What the fuck are we gonna do?
In response Suarez held up his radio’s microphone; nothing but static and occasional broken up syllables.
“I can rebroadcast,” Connors offered.
“Can you fit inside the track so I can show you on the map?” Suarez asked.
“Not necessary, sir,” answered Connors as his AID enhanced suit again projected a map between them. “All my people can see the same image.”
“They can all see it? Nice. Okay, Captain, we’ve got no normal commo so everything is going to go from me, through your suit, to your people and then to mine. This is what I want.”
Suarez’s finger began to trace out a circle into which his half scattered battalions would fall and hold… or in which they would die. If asked, Suarez would have bet on “die.”
“Oh, God, I don’t want to die!” was Cortez’s first voiced thought as he saw the wave of centaurs cresting the high ground to the north. It was fortunate that his radio, like everyone else’s, couldn’t send or receive. The only thing holding the 1st Division’s cohesion together at all was the fact that none of his subordinates could hear their commander.
A nearby light tank company, Cortez’s personal escort, turned into the coming storm, flailing away with machine guns and canister. For an all too brief moment it looked like they might hold. And then railgun fire began to chew through the thin Chinese-built armor. By ones and twos the tanks began to brew up as their crews were cut to ribbons and railgun fleshettes set alight their on-board ammunition and fuel.
“Turn around! Turn around!” Cortez shrieked at his driver.
The driver obeyed, pivot steering the Type-63 one hundred and eighty degrees to the south, then gunning the engine to race away, trailing a cloud of thick, nasty diesel smoke behind.
Cortez’s eyes remained fixed to the north where the Posleen wave lapped over a mixed column of trucks and artillery. The gunners, he saw, were struggling to free their guns and fire even as the wave swept over them and cut them down.
A medical unit, two thirds female as Cortez could well see, was the next to go under. The men of the unit attempted to make a stand to cover the retreat of the women. Without machine guns, or even more than a few rifles, the men went under quickly. The Posleen then pursued the women, chopping the poor screaming wretches down from behind and then stopping to butcher their bodies and feast before continuing the pursuit.
Cortez felt nothing at that, despite having used his position more than once to bed some of the women of that unit. They had been, after all, just office and peasant girls, not women of class and breeding; not anyone who mattered.
A man would have turned and died then, to protect the women. Cortez simply urged his driver to move faster.
Julio Diaz cursed that his glider could not move any faster. On only his second actual combat mission Diaz already had begun to feel like a war-weary veteran. One thing was different about this mission from the previous day’s; his radio worked perfectly.
And everyone else’s was in electronic bedlam; those, anyway, that Diaz could not see stretched out, butchered and lifeless, below. They were hard to see, too, because Panama’s normally emerald grass was tinted red across half a kilometer to either side of the Inter-American highway.
This was awful beyond words, even awful beyond thought; fifteen or twenty thousand of his countrymen, and women, massacred, rendered and eaten. Clusters of Posleen, some of them numbering in the thousands, walked among the dead, hewing a head here, splitting a femur there. Crossing himself, Julio thanked the Almighty, above, that the aliens continued to ignore him.
God did not or would not save him from everything. Despite having an empty stomach from once again, embarrassingly, having to vomit during his launch, Diaz needed to puke again. Only the fact that he was above the smell of slaughter saved him from that.
Still cruising while slowly sinking, without units to spot for, Diaz didn’t even think to call for support from the cruiser that had blessedly answered him the day before. Sure, he could have killed Posleen, and that might have satisfied his urge for revenge. But revenge was a thin soup, faced with the enormity of the slaughter.
Despite the barren feeling of hopelessness, Diaz continued to fly westward. When he returned to base, if he returned, his father would need to know the extent of the disaster.
To his right the sun was sinking. Even as it sank, Cortez’s hopes began to rise. His tank was amphibious. With any luck he would soon reach the sea and could set out on that, safely towards home.
With all the fearful paranoia of a hunted fox, Cortez had guided his tank and crew from the scenes of slaughter. Several times, when the pounding of alien claws on the earth had warned him of an approaching horde, he had ordered his tank into low ground, dense Kunai grass or copses of thick standing trees. His luck had held. While groups of refugees and even the occasional fragment of a cohesive unit had fallen all around him, the aliens had never noticed or, if noticing, cared enough to actually seek him out. He supposed they must have had enough to eat.
While opening his own bag of gringo-supplied combat rations, Cortez began to contemplate the future. He was facing a court-martial, he knew. Last time he had deserted a command, in 1989, he had been fortunate that his government had followed its army into extinction quickly. This time he could not hope for such a boon. His government and army would survive this debacle long enough for him to see the inside of a courtroom and the pockmarked wall before the firing squad. His uncle, the president, would clearly toss him to the wolves.
Worse, his driver, loader and gunner would be the star witnesses at his court-martial. They had the defense of superior orders, at least. He had only his own will to live, no matter what.
Can I count on Uncle Guillermo to quash any charges? Only two possibilities: either the country and the government falls, in which case there’ll be nothing to quash, or they somehow manage to establish a defensive line, in which case there will.