by John Ringo
That division died, for the most part, in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, but not before that ten million could be evacuated to shelter. Curiously, no one north of the border found cause to complain about illegal immigration. Ten million Mexican immigrants meant another million or more men and women for the United States Army.
A small group of relatively poor Posleen set down in Colombia between the mountains and the sea. The Colombian army folded quickly. The various private armies, paramilitaries of the right, the left and the narcotraffickers, succeeded for the nonce in holding substantial parts of the undeveloped part of the country, as well as the mountain fringed capital, Bogotá.
The invaders also touched down on both sides of the Rio de la Plata in the vicinity of Buenas Aires, Argentina and Montevideo, Uruguay. Pastoral and open, ideal ground for the Posleen “cavalry,” both countries quickly succumbed.
From their base in southeastern South America the Posleen spread out to the north and west. For the nonce Brazil was able to hold them out, though at terrible cost. To the west Chile, with strong natural defenses through the Andes passes held by well trained, tough and disciplined mountain troops, and aided by a company of 1st Battalion, 508th Infantry (ACS) stopped the Posleen cold… literally cold.
Fort Kobbe, Republic of Panama
The smell from the “puke trees” that marked the demarcation line between the Army’s Fort Kobbe and Howard Air Force Base drifted across Kobbe’s main street, making those not used to it, as Scott Connors wasn’t used to it, want to retch. Fortunately, Connors and his battalion commander were walking south, away from the trees and toward the tent city in which the First of the Five-O-Eighth was billeted.
The stench of the puke trees matched Connors’ mood as it had been since opening his mail on the long space voyage back to Earth. It was hard to take an interest in things after one’s carefully constructed world falls down around one. Still, he was a soldier, was an officer, and going through the motions wasn’t that difficult after more than fifteen years of service.
“That’s not a helluva lot of prep time you’re giving us,” Connors said to his battalion commander, Snyder.
“Captain, there isn’t a lot of prep time we’ve been given. So stop sniveling about what can’t be changed and just soldier on, why don’t you?”
“Yessir,” Connors answered. In truth he wasn’t a sniveler and he knew the Old Man knew that. Must be the pressure of seeing most of this hemisphere fall so quickly that’s making him testy, he thought.
“The submarine’s going to be here tonight,” Snyder continued. “It will spend the night loading consumables, mostly ammunition, for your company. You and your men will board around 0500. You’ll have a four day sail, underwater, to Valparaiso, Chile. From there you will attach yourselves to the Chilean Army but only for purposes of helping them hold the Uspallata Pass.”
“Why Chile?” Connors asked.
“Two reasons, I suspect,” Snyder answered. “One is that, since the Posleen have not landed on the western Side of the Andes and the passes over range from ‘limited’ to ‘no fucking way,’ we might actually have a chance to hang on to the place. The other reason is that Chile is still the world’s best source of copper, which we need for damned near everything, and produces — especially since the expansion for the war — a couple of million tons of nitrates a year. We need the nitrates even more than we need the copper.”
“Okay, boss. Roger, wilco and all that happy horseshit. But what the hell do they expect a single company of MI to do?”
Snyder almost laughed. “If nothing else, Captain, the Army expects you to die well. I, on the other hand, expect you to hold that fucking pass until the Chileans can get some better fixed defenses in and then get your ass back here, as whole and as sound and as up to strength as humanly possible.”
“One company of MI?” Connors asked dubiously.
“Captain, have you ever seen the Andes?”
Muelle (Pier) 18, Balboa, Republic of Panama
Connors hadn’t really expected the sub to be as big as it was. Although mostly hidden, the length of the thing dwarfed the pier. The only thing bigger, nearby, was the heavy cruiser, USS Salem, docked two bays over.
A navy chief with a stupendous gut met Connors dockside. He introduced himself as “Chief Petty Officer Kaiser, Major.” Connors did a double take and then remembered that, aboard ship, there could be but one “captain.”
“Sir,” Kaiser continued, “we’ve actually got space for more troops than you’re bringing aboard. What we don’t have space for is the number of men and those big bloody suits. This trip out, you’re going to be stacked like sardines.” He added, apologetically, “It’s gonna suck like a convention of Subic Bay whores.”
Connors shrugged indifferently, then smiled. “Chief, if you’ve never been in a C-130 after a twelve-hour flight trying to on-board rig for a jump then you don’t know what ‘suck’ is. We’ll be fine once we get settled in.”
The chief liked Connors’ sense of proportion. “That’s another thing, Skipper. The boat’s decks and all were never meant for half ton suits of armor. We’re trying to reinforce them but…”
“Stop trying, Chief. We can dial down our effective weight to nothing. Matter of fact, if we really wanted to, working together my company could probably pick up the sub and fly it… bounce it around for a while anyway.”
“No shit, huh?”
“No shit, Chief. Oh, we couldn’t fly it all the way to Chile… well… maybe if we could somehow tap into the sub’s own reactor and charge the suits at a rate of about ten to one. But we could move it around. It would take longer than sailing though.”
“Coool,” admired Kaiser. “Well, you don’t need to fly us anywhere. And the captain will be mighty pleased to hear that you’re not going to warp our decks.”
“How long’s it going to take us to get to Valparaiso?” Connors asked.
Kaiser looked around to make sure no one else was in earshot. Then, conspiratorially, he said, “Officially, we couldn’t get you there in less than four and a half days at top speed. Unofficially, you’ll hit the beach seventy-three hours after we set sail.”
“Cooool.”
Valparaiso, Chile
“Cooool,” intoned Connors as he stepped up from the cramped troop bay of the submarine and took his first look at the Port of Valparaiso. He was suited up, of course, since he and B Company were heading into action as soon as they finished unloading, but his helmet was under his arm so that he had an unobstructed and natural view of the city.
Valparaiso was laid out more or less in the form of an amphitheater, with a wide, flat, circular harbor surrounded by steep hills on all side. The houses clinging to the hillsides were gaily, even gaudily, painted. Connors thought he could see elevators moving up and down the hills carrying people to and from their work.
A dress-white clad Chilean naval officer (for Chile had a very long, honorable, and even impressive tradition in its naval service, as well as in one other) met Connors from the pier. Connors took a double take; the Chilean officer bore an absolutely striking resemblance to Admiral Guenther Lutjens who had gone down with the Bismarck in 1941.
“Capitán Connors,” the naval officer called breathlessly, as if he had run the hills himself. “Capitán Connors, I need to speak with you. You… you and your men… must hurry.”
Connors debarked and was pleased to see that, no, they hadn’t succeeded just yet in resurrecting naval ghosts. On the other hand, the naval officer’s name tag did say, “Lindemann.” Connors raised an inquisitive eyebrow.
“Fourth cousin, twice removed,” answered the Chilean. “Come. Bring your men. I’ve held up the railway for them.”
MI could move fast, but only at a cost in power. Fortunately, railroads could move just about as fast and there was one working between Valparaiso and the Uspallata Pass.
The Transandean railway had been in operation from 1910 to 1982, though it had ceased passenger service as ea
rly as 1978 under the stress of competition with automobile and bus traffic from the coaxial highway, a part of the Pan-American Highway system. Closed for twenty years and allowed to rot and rust away all that time, the governments of Argentina, Chile and the United States opened negotiations in 2002 to restore the railway. This was actually not that difficult an operation as the really serious work, the grading and the blasting, was still extant and for the most part still in as good a shape as ever. Even so, only one of two lines had been completed and didn’t that play hell with resupply and troop movements.
It was this line that Connors and B Company took up the Andean Slopes to where a regiment of tough Chilean mountain infantry (the other part of Chile’s armed forces that enjoyed international respect and admiration) were holding on by their fingernails against the Posleen probes coming over the mountains and through the pass.
The MI suits had been dialed down to be nearly weightless and inertialess. Even so, the train squealed with the strain of just moving itself up the tortuous and steep tracks. As the temperature dropped as precipitously as the mountain range grew overhead, the troopers of B Company — for the most part clinging to the tops of the cars, there being another regiment of reserve mountain infantry inside the cars — donned helmets to keep from freezing. The mountain troops made room inside one of the cars for Connors, who stood mostly in the central passageway. He had to be inside to get the latest update from Lindemann. Nor could Lindemann stay outside without freezing. The Chilean was clothed for cold weather, of course, but not for Arctic levels of cold weather accompanied by the subjective winds created by the train as it screamed up the track.
“We expected the Argentines to do better,” Lindemann cursed. “But at the first sign of a landing their upper classes, to include an absolutely disgusting percentage of their senior military officers, took to ships, abandoning their people. Some of their units fought and died hard, even so, but they went under before we expected and before we could do much about it.”
Connors said nothing to this. It was one thing for a South American to criticize another group of South Americans. It was unclear to him how they would take criticism from a gringo. Whaddya know, I learned some tact in my old age.
“We were fortunate that we had a regiment of mountain troops training in the vicinity of Mount Aconcagua when the aliens first landed,” Lindemann explained, “fortunate too that we were able to get them some more ammunition and rations before they actually had to fight. But they’ve got no fixed defenses and their only artillery is a battalion of light mountain guns, that and their own mortars. We’re still mobilizing reservists and trying to shift some units down from the other passes. But it’s been hard.”
“Why no fixed defenses?” Connors asked. “I would have thought they’d have been a natural for those passes.”
Lindemann rubbed a hand wearily across his jaw. “Yes, one would have thought so. Blame your State Department, actually.”
“Huh?”
“They brokered a deal between us, the United States, the Galactic Federation and Argentina under which substantial U.S. and some Galactic aid would be given in return for the creation of a combined command. Not building fortifications in the passes was supposed to be… hmmm… let me see if I can remember the words exactly. Oh, yes, I recall. The absence of fortification was ‘symbolic of the determination of our two countries, with the help of the United States and the Galactic Federation, to stand and fight together as one.’ Who knows,” Lindemann said, philosophically, “if it had been us rather than the Argentines who had been hit first perhaps we would have run and it would be an Argentine mountain infantry regiment trying to keep the aliens from crossing to their side of the pass.
“In any case,” Lindemann concluded, “just for your future use, Captain Connors, you can never go wrong betting on the avarice, selfishness, and cowardice of the Latin American upper classes. Exceptions are, just that, exceptional.”
Suddenly, Connors’ suit was almost thrown and Lindemann’s body was thrown as the train shuddered and screamed to an unplanned stop. The Chilean gasped as he hit shoulder first, breaking his collar bone. The reservists also in the car were tossed around like ninepins.
“That was an HVM, Captain Connors,” the suit’s AID announced, with typical calm. “I sense a great deal of damage to the train’s locomotive. The company has taken no casualties. I can’t say about the Chileans, though.”
Connors didn’t hesitate. “Bravo Company, this is the CO. Off the trains and assume ‘Y’ formation with Second Platoon in reserve and weapons forming the stump of the Y. We move out in two minutes. CP will be just ahead of Second. Now move, people.”
Connors asked the Chilean, “Are you going to be all right, sir?”
“I will be… fine,” Lindemann gasped. “Just go save that pass.”
B Company took off at the double, leaving the Chilean regiment behind to sort themselves out and follow as best they could through the driving snow and biting wind.
The armored combat suits did better than ninety-five percent of the work. This is not the same as saying they did all the work. Moving twelve hundred pounds of mixed Connors and suit up a forty-five degree slope, through deep snow laid over hard packed ice, at thirty miles an hour had the captain gasping even before they hit the friendly side of the pass.
“AID… what can you… tell me… about what’s up… ahead?” Connors croaked.
“Damned little, Captain,” the AID answered in a voice annoyingly similar to Connors’ lost Lynn.
I knew I should have changed that, he thought.
“The Chileans are still fighting but I can’t tell how many for certain. Based on the vibrations I am picking up from the air and through the snow on the ground I would estimate that there are something like five hundred of them still remaining on the line.”
The AID noted Connors’ labored breathing and silently directed the suit to pull extra oxygen out of the thin air and force feed it to the captain. The effect was almost instantaneous.
“There is also an artillery unit, estimated at battalion size, just a few kilometers to the right front. If you try, you can hear them firing.”
Connors thought about that for a moment then ordered, “Show me the pattern on the ground of where their shells are landing.”
“That will take a while, Captain,” the AID answered.
“Why?” Connors began to ask then said, “Oh, never mind. You have to sense a fairly large number of shells flying to detect a pattern.”
“That is correct, Captain Connors.”
In about a minute, or perhaps a few seconds more, the AID had an answer. Saying, “This is the pattern,” it projected an image, superimposed over a map of the area, directly onto Connors’ eye.
“I’m guessing,” Connors said, after seeing the pattern of fire, “but it is a good guess. The Chileans are probably dug in a semicircle, give or take, at the base of that mountain to the north, Mount…”
“Mount Aconcagua,” the AID supplied.
“I’m making another guess. The Posleen, instead of pushing on down the pass towards Santiago” — Chile’s capital — “have decided instead to key on the mountain troops.”
This human tendency towards intuition was a source of both vast entertainment value and vast frustration to the AID. It never could quite understand…
“What makes you say that, Captain?”
“Two reasons, AID. The first is that if they hadn’t the Posleen would be down among us by now. The second is… well… what’s the temperature up there?”
“Cold, Captain,” the AID answered. “Minus twelve Celsius and with a wind chill that would kill an exposed man in minutes without superb winter clothing.”
“Right,” Connors said, struggling to keep from sliding on a patch of ice. “Now, we know the Posleen are pretty hardy. We know they’ve been designed for some pretty outrageous environments. I wouldn’t be surprised if they could raise their body temperature to beat off any practical cold
pretty much on command. But what would they need to do that, AID?”
Damned humans. “They’d need food, wouldn’t they, Captain? That, and to suck in a great deal of very cold air to get enough oxygen to burn the food with.”
“Count on it, and that will make them colder still. The Posleen are going for the Chileans rather than pushing on because if they don’t get that additional thresh there’s going to be nothing but Posleen icicles all over this pass and on both sides.”
The AID went silent then, leaving Connors to think about other problems. How do we hit them? Surprise would be best. If we can get that it almost doesn’t matter from where we hit.
“AID, I need a recommendation on camouflage for this environment.”
“Snow, Captain.”
“That won’t work. They’ll see us as soon as we silhouette ourselves.”
“No, Captain Connors, I meant a snow storm. We can project a holographic storm high enough and thick enough that the Posleen are most unlikely to notice what’s inside it.”
Damned AIDs. “Do it. And get me control of those mountain guns.”
“Go over the mountains,” the Aarnadaha, or Big Pack Leader, had said. “Go over the mountains and carve out a fief for us. Nothing blocks your way but some lightly armed threshkreen. We have fought the heavily armed ones of this continent and butchered them with ease. What trouble can their merest foot troops give you?”
What trouble indeed, snarled Prithasinthas, a mid-ranking Kessentai leading about seven thousand of the People westward. Plenty of trouble, they’ve been. But not so much as this damned cold. How the hell do they stand it? How the hell do they stand and fight us in it? Ill was the day I left the world of my birth to come here.
The God King saw several of his people hacking steaks off of the human and Posleen dead, to try to gain some desperately needed thresh. The boma blades cut through the meat and bone effortlessly, but when the stupid normals tried to bite?