Yellow Eyes lota-8

by John Ringo

  Even Posleen teeth have trouble munching large slabs of solid ice.

  Prithasinthas and his group kept below what the threshkreen would have called the “military crest.” Here they were safe from the humans’ direct fire weapons. The God King wondered why the enemy were not using their indirect ballistic weapons on such a tempting target. His best guess was that the indirect weapons were too busy firing in support of the threshkreen encircled ahead to waste any shells and effort on a danger that only lurked at a distance.

  The Kessentai looked up to see another approaching front of this miserable freezing snow. As if we don’t have enough troubles, he thought, shivering.

  “B Company,” Connors began, “we’ll advance until either the Posleen see us or I give the order to begin the attack. Whichever happens first, I want First Platoon to go forward to the military crest and seal off the battlefield. Weapons Platoon, you go with them. Keep any reinforcements from entering the pass. Second and Third, you’re with me. We’re going to hit the horsies that I think have the Chileans pinned. We’re going to hit them right in the ass and roll them up. Watch out for friendlies.”

  “Sir?” asked First Platoon leader, “the crest is our limit of advance, right?

  “Right.”

  “Well… what if we get to the crest before you’re ready to hit and they still haven’t spotted us?”

  “Hold fire then until they do start coming up. Think hasty ambush.”

  “Roger that, sir.”

  “You can’t keep the host here much longer, lord,” Prithasinthas’ Artificial Sentience warned. “They’ll freeze to death.”

  “Tell me about it, AS,” answered the God King who was slowly freezing to death himself.

  “It would not be so bad, lord, if you could just get them out of the wind.”

  “Do you see a ship nearby?” Prithasinthas asked sarcastically. “Perhaps a huge Temple of Remembrance? Is there a city of the thresh up here we somehow missed?”

  “Errr… no, lord. There is, however a tunnel.”

  “What? Where?”

  Without another word, and unable to mark the tunnel quickly in any other way, the AS aimed the tenar’s plasma cannon and let fly one bolt at the featureless snow. It struck a few hundred meters in front of the lead edge of the host, causing the normals there to shudder and shy away. When the steam cleared there was an almost square tunnel carved into the rock.

  “Well, I’ll be… Kessentai, this is the Aarnadaha. Get your people into that tunnel my AS has just found. Be orderly, now; no jostling.”

  “Where does it lead?” the Aarnadaha asked his AS, for the moment attached to the tenar.

  “I suspect it emerges on the other side of the pass, lord.”

  “Interesting.”

  One of the great things, one of the really great things, about the suits was that you couldn’t see out of them. That is to say, they had no view ports. No clear face screens: zero, zip, zilch… nada. Instead, sensors on the suit’s exterior took the images, analyzed them, adjusted them, and painted them directly on the eyes of the suits’ wearers, their “colloidal intelligence units.”

  In the process, the suits eliminated the unreal. For example, while the Posleen were steeling themselves for the blast of snow and ice they saw coming towards them, Connors and his boys didn’t even see the holographic display. Rather, they saw a mass of staggering Posleen, or simply shivering ones if those happened to be riding a tenar, blasting blindly forward and often enough falling to the yellow stained snow under the fire of the white-clad human defenders.

  The AID automatically analyzed that fire, too, matching it to what was known and suspected about the Posleen deployment.

  “Pretty close to what we figured from the pattern of artillery fire,” Connors observed.

  “Naturally, Captain,” the AID answered.

  Connors took a last look at his own deployments, matched those to the Posleen, and decided, Close enough for government work.

  “B Companeeee… AT ’EM.”

  Instantly, long actinic lines lanced out from the skirmish lines of second and third platoons, while weapons and third kicked it into high gear and raced for the far military crest. The Posleen surrounding the remnants of the Chilean mountain troops were scythed down, tenar-riding God Kings falling first before the fires lowered onto the staggering mass of struggling normals.

  “Captain, First Platoon. Boss, there isn’t shit here. No horsies close at all, though there’s a long column of the fuckers that starts a couple of clicks away. They’re not moving much. Even the tenar are grounded with the God Kings huddling with the normals. I don’t get it.”

  At about that time, the weapons platoon leader came on line with the shout, “Shit! Action rear! Fuckfuckfuck! Pot that bastard, Smitty!”

  “Oh, yeah,” Prithasinthas said aloud, and with vast relief, as his tenar entered the tunnel and he felt the wind drop to nothing. Ahead of him, three to four abreast, the host moved forward en masse with only a gap every few hundred meters for the tenar of the Kessentai, gliding only a few inches above the odd metal parallel tracks on the tunnel’s floor. It would have been dark, too dark even for the People’s enhanced vision to see by, if those tenar had not shone bright forward lights to illuminate the way.

  “There’s firing above, Prithasinthas.” The AS’s volume was toned down enough to keep it from echoing off the walls and upsetting the normals.

  “I knew that, AS.”

  “No, not the firing that was. This is something different, something consistent with the metal threshkreen that have been reported in other places. I think there might be a bit less than one hundred and fifty of them.”

  “Demon shit!” Prithasinthas had heard of the metal threshkreen and had liked nothing about what he’d heard.

  “They don’t know we’re down here, lord,” the AS added suggestively. “The Net would assign much wealth to the Kessentai who took out an entire oolt of them.”

  “AID,” demanded a furious Connors, “why didn’t you tell me about the goddamned tunnel?”

  “You never asked,” it answered primly. “It’s the job of you colloidal intelligences to ask.”

  Connors tried furiously to think. No time to think… just react! “Shit, piss and corruption! First Platoon, hold what you’ve got. Weapons, orient west. Second Platoon, break contact and reinforce weapons. I’m with second. Third, try to free up the Chileans.”

  It’ll have to do.

  Connors raced to the rear, to link up with his weapons platoon. When he reached the west side military crest he threw himself down into the snow. The AID, using the suit’s sensors, mapped out what was in front of the captain.

  The Posleen were pouring out of the side of the mountain at what seemed to be a rate of about one thousand per minute. Already, over a thousand, accompanied by the God Kings riding tenar, were up and charging toward the summit of the pass. Jesus! How many can be in there?

  Though he hadn’t asked, the AID supplied the information. “There are anywhere from five to nine thousand of the enemy remaining in the tunnel, Captain.”

  Connors was more than pleased to see one of the Posleen tenar, touched by a plasma bolt, disintegrate with a tremendous explosion. It gave him an idea.

  “Weapons, send me a plasma gunner.”

  The weapons platoon leader ordered, “Rivers, fall in on the company commander.”

  While the gunner was racing up, Connors asked his AID, “Can you tell me when I am over the tunnel? Can you direct me there?”

  “Twenty-seven meters due south, Captain.”

  The plasma gunner arrived and Connors half dragged him to where he thought the tunnel was. “Mark it for us, AID.” The tunnel’s route was painted onto the captain’s and gunner’s eyes.

  “Okay, Rivers. You can’t fire down to make a hole; you’d blast our legs off. I’m going to use my grav gun to make a breach and then I want you to fire into it. Got that?”

  “Yessir,” Rivers answered in a Midw
est accent. Immediately Connors pointed his grav gun down and fired a long burst. At this range and that velocity the stream of teardrop-shaped projectiles quickly opened up a hole about a foot across. The hole smoked like a vent from Hell. Connors thought he could hear Posleen screaming in agony below.

  “Fire, Rivers!” The gunner put the muzzle of his plasma cannon to the hole and sent a bolt into it. This time Connors was sure he heard Posleen screams. “Again… again… again.” Rivers tossed bolt after bolt downward until he thought he might be overheating his cannon.

  “Cease fire, Rivers,” Connors ordered. “Cease fire before you…”

  The ground erupted in a long, linear blast that tossed both the captain and the plasma gunner skyward. Flame erupted from both ends of the tunnel, flash melting snow and rock indiscriminately for hundreds of meters past each opening.

  “Ooohhh… SHIT!”

  “I believe the plasma must have set off the power source for a tenar, Captain,” the AID announced calmly as it, Connors and the suit flew through the air. “It might have set off several more.”

  Gaining control of the suit was tricky, under the circumstances. Connors managed, if only barely, to bring it back down feet first and come to a landing to one side of the trench dug by the blast.

  “Man, what a ride,” he said, with wonder in his voice.

  The wonder was only half at the wild ride. More importantly, Connors realized that, for the first time since receiving his “Dear Scott” letter, he actually felt good.

  Lindemann, his shoulder bandaged now, managed to make the trek on foot up to the pass. When he got there, he found Connors sitting disconsolately on a rock not far from the base of Mount Anconcagua. The half frozen flag of Chile — a square blue field with a single white star in one corner, white bar over red making up the field — fluttered stiffly in the breeze.

  Around the base of the flag, still holding their weapons at the ready, nineteen or twenty Chilean mountain infantry lay frozen stiff on the snow. Lindemann looked around. Without the holographic snow displayed by the suits earlier it was easy to see the hundreds upon hundreds of frozen bodies, alien and human both, littering the landscape.

  “How many?” Lindemann asked, though he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

  Unseen inside his suit, Connors licked his lips before answering. He could have taken the helmet off, but his face was wet. Not only didn’t he want anyone to see that, he didn’t want the tears to freeze solid on that face.

  “There were three hundred and twenty-two still alive when we killed the last of the Posleen,” he answered. “A lot of them were hurt already. We did what we could. But it wasn’t enough. The regiment that was here has… AID, how many?”

  “There are one hundred and five of the Chilean soldiers still alive, Captain.”

  “One hundred and five, sir. That’s all. I’m sorry, sir.”

  Lindemann said nothing. His eyes searched around for the Christ of the Andes, a colossal statue famous around the world. He didn’t find it. Whether it had been knocked down by Posleen fire or human didn’t much matter, he supposed. The days of turning the other cheek were over anyway, after all.

  “We pull out tomorrow,” Connors announced. “Back to the sub that brought us here and then back to Panama. I doubt we’ll be returning.”

  “What about the other Posleen?” Lindemann asked. “The ones following these?”

  “Frozen stiff,” Connors answered. “I sent out a patrol forward and they report that there are thousands of them… maybe as many as fifty thousand, lined up and frozen for thirty kilometers to the west.

  “I’ve got my men blasting out some fortifications for your people,” Connors finished. “It’s the best I can do.”

  Interlude

  Chile was not exactly what most of the Posleen would consider to be prime real estate. Narrow, bounded by ocean and mountain, the Posleen clan which took it — assuming one did, and this was not necessarily the way to bet — would be naturally constrained from expanding against other clans after the final extermination of the local thresh.

  On the other hand, for some lesser clans this sort of patch of ground was ideal. If they could not easily expand neither could other clans easily expand against them. Indeed, within the Posleen “ecology,” there were numerous clans who adopted this as a general survival technique. While they never became dominant, and rarely even particularly prosperous, within the Posleen system, they were usually able to hang on while the worlds around them came apart during orna’adar. Then, neither more nor less well off than when they had first landed, they escaped more or less intact.

  Panama, bounded by sea on both sides, had a similar appeal to the clan of Binastarion. There, with difficult-to-pass jungle to the east and a narrow frontier to the west, that clan could settle, grow food, live and defend themselves when, as eventually they must, population pressures caused interclan war, eventually descending into nuclear and antimatter holocaust.

  Moreover, in the case of Panama, there was a special appeal. From the command deck of his mini-globe, Binastarion observed on his screen that the waist of the country was not only extremely narrow but had a major body of water right in the middle of that waist. Better still the body of water, his screen called it “Gatun Lake,” was itself flanked by bridged but otherwise impassable canals.

  This meant that, when orna’adar began, bringing with it the usual mad scramble for living space, Binastarion’s clan could trade space for either alliance or time. In the case of attack from the east, they could fall behind that lake and canal and hang on in the west. Alternatively, in the case of attack from the west, they could resettle to the east.

  Of course, should attack come from both quarters they were just screwed, but life was never fair, as Binastarion had good reason to know.

  “Sometimes you get the abat, sometimes the abat get you,” the clan chief muttered as he played a claw over the screen, selecting the initial landing areas.

  Chapter 11

  Bella, detesta matribus. (War, the horror of mothers.)

  — Horace

  Bijagual, Chiriqui, Republic of Panama

  Digna could read a map even before going to OCS at Fort Espinar. She sat on the front porch of her house, a building that also did double duty as the local militia headquarters, rocking in her old chair and intently studying a map of Central America and northern Colombia in an atlas.

  Idly, she wondered why Panama hadn’t yet been included on the aliens’ menu. Less idly, she gave thanks to God that it hadn’t been.

  “Every day He grants us is one more day to prepare,” she whispered.

  Omar beat frantically on the door to his grandmother’s bedroom. “Mamita, Mamita, wake up!”

  The door sprang open under Omar’s pounding fist.

  “What is it, boy?” Digna demanded.

  Breathless, he answered, “The enemy, the Posleen… they’re here!”

  “ ‘Here’? Where? Bring me the maps, boy, quickly. And light a lantern.”

  Pulling on a robe, Digna emerged into the darkened main room of the house to discover some dozens of her descendants, old and young, as well as Tomas Herrera, waiting.

  A kerosene lantern already burned in the room, casting shifting shadows across the walls. There could have been electricity, of course, except that having power lines run in to an out-of-the-way private establishment was, under Panama’s system, a matter of private, and not small private, expense. Her husband, wealthy or not, had never seen the point of paying to run in power lines when kerosene did well enough.

  Neither had Digna.

  The lack of electric power did not mean the house was entirely without power. A radio, crank powered, blared out the horrible news: landings northwest of the City of San Jose y David, David for short, and southwest of the town of Santiago, in the province of Veraguas. Thus, to both sides of Chiriqui the Inter-American highway was cut.

  Escape was still possible for Digna and her clan, over the mountains to the north b
ut…

  “Not yet,” she said aloud. “First we fight… for our land… and our honor.”

  She looked down at the table where Omar spread the national and local maps. As he struck a match and touched it to the wick of another lantern the shadows on walls softened, flickered and mostly disappeared.

  Digna contemplated the maps, eyes flitting from one to the other as her mind raced, calculating.

  A huge-eyed great-great-granddaughter, Gigi, offered a cup of the strong and excellent local coffee. Digna blew on the scalding brew then sipped absently, still contemplating the maps.

  Word of the attack spread fast. As Digna contemplated, more of her children and grandchildren entered the room until it grew hot, stuffy and very crowded. At length she looked up and did a mental roll call. Seeing that the elders of her clan were now fully assembled she began to give orders.

  “We’ve been over this before,” she explained, “but just so there’s no confusion, there is only one way for the enemy to get to the core of our land, here,” she pointed to a spot on the lesser map, “at the bridge.”

  She pointed to a son and ordered, “Roderigo, take your cavalry and screen forward between here and the outskirts of David. Report on enemy movements and call for fire on any groups that seem determined to use the road that leads to us.”

  Roderigo nodded but, in shock, did not move immediately.

  “Did I raise a dolt? Go! Now!”

  “Si, Mama,” and the old man left to gather his sons and grandsons.

  Digna turned her eyes to Tomas. “Señor Herrera, take your group to the positions we have dug covering the bridge. Cavalry will screen your flanks. Do final preparations to blow the bridge but, until I give the word, we hold it.”

  Before Herrera could leave Digna said, “Wait a moment, Tomas. Edilze, I want the guns to take up Firing Position D. You will fire in support of your uncle Roderigo until the enemy is within your minimum range. After that, I want you to displace forward and add your guns to Señor Herrera’s force at the bridge.”