Yellow Eyes lota-8

by John Ringo

  “Haul away,” Herrera commanded and the prisoner’s previous guards sprang to the rope and began to pull. Once the kicking feet were a meter off the ground he told them to tie the rope off, cut it and bring him the remainder… and more rope.

  The gagging and kicking of the first had not stopped before the second, too, was elevated. In all it took Herrera almost an hour before all thirteen thieves were strung up and dead — or nearly so, a few pairs of feet still twitched. The bodies swayed gently in the wind, the smell of shit from loosened sphincters wafting on the breeze.

  There’s a stinging advertisement for social responsibility, Herrera thought.

  From her vantage point, hidden behind a large rock and some vegetation, Digna could make out the pursuing Posleen through her army issue field glasses. The aliens seemed to her to be hesitant, much more so than they had been during the assault on the bridges by Bijagual and Gualaca. Too, she noted, there seemed to be many fewer of their damned flying sleds. Lastly, from what she could tell, the aliens seemed… somehow… clumsy. Not that they were clumsy as individuals, no, but they seemed clumsy as groups, as if their leadership were being strained to the limits.

  “Something has hurt them badly, after all,” she whispered to herself. “Blessings on whoever or whatever it was.”

  Slower the aliens were. For all that, they were still moving quicker than her column of refugees. They had to be slowed down.

  “But where?” she asked herself. Then she closed her eyes and tried to envision the whole area around the road and the pass behind her.

  South of where the road wound across the mountains was a military crest, so called because it would allow long fields of grazing fire downward and long-range observation. The road itself S-turned through a pass carved out of the mountain rock through the topographical crest, the actual summit of the rise. To either side of that narrow pass rock walls rose vertically, occasional stunted trees clinging to their tiny crevasses and ledges.

  The aliens aren’t built to climb those walls, Digna thought, not even with all their strength. Their sleds could get over but they’d do so without the supporting fires of the rest of their horde. That would make them easy meat for my boys.

  Digna looked again at the rock walls. She found no place for a horse, even one aided by arms, to surmount the crest. But I can send people up. A tough climb, yes, but not impossible for human beings.

  She mounted her horse and began forcing it through the still teeming column of refugees. It was especially difficult in the narrow pass, which was only a bit wider than the two lane highway through it. On the far — northern — side Digna found essentially what she had expected to see, a mirror image of the southern face.

  The only difference is that the aliens are trying to climb while our people are trying to descend.

  Digna tried to think back to what her instructors had said about the three types of crests. The military crest isn’t worth much, not with the trees in the way, she thought. The great thing about the reverse crest is that I can cover the pass and road from it, while the aliens can’t shoot our escaping people from the rear as long as we hold it. And inside that pass we can butcher them with the mortars… as long as the ammunition holds out, anyway. We can, I hope we can, buy enough time for the refugees to make it to the coast, to Chiriqui Grande where they might be able to escape by sea.

  With those factors in mind, Digna began to make her plans.

  Chiriqui Grande, Bocas del Toro Province, Republic of Panama

  The sign outside the abandoned school proclaimed, “Tactical Operations Center, 10th United States Infantry Regiment (Apaches).”

  Standing in the schoolyard, Preiss contemplated the curious things soldiers, who — as a class — tended to have no fixed home, would do to give the impressions and sensations of normalcy to create one. The sign was one such example. There had been no particularly good reason to bring it, absolutely no reason to make it the number one priority — well, tied for number one along with setting up the radios — in establishing the TOC, yet there it stood, even while the long-range antennas were still being erected. Preiss could only account for it by the need for soldiers, as people, to have someplace called home, with the trappings of home.

  Preiss looked at the sign again, shook his head and entered the former schoolhouse turned tactical operations center. Inside he removed his helmet — useless thing really, given the enemy’s weaponry — and ran his fingers through sweat-soaked hair. His eyes wandered over the map, tracing not only the positions of his forward units but also the positions of the landing craft from the 1097th Boat that were bringing in the rest of the troops of the regiment, their supplies, and their vehicles. The landing craft came in full of troops and gear and left crammed to the gunwales with anything up to five hundred civilians each, fleeing the oncoming horde. Curiously, thought Preiss, not a single one had yet called out “Gringos go home.”

  The thing is, Preiss mourned, we don’t have the first goddamned idea of what’s ahead of us. My RPVs lasted maybe two minutes after cresting the Continental Divide. My lead scouts are still struggling up the jungle slopes. Well, he corrected, not “no idea.” I know there are about ten or fifteen thousand more civilians heading this way, refugees from the debacle in Chiriqui Province.

  “XO,” Preiss said, “I’m taking my Hummer and heading north. Keep in touch. You’re in charge until I get back.”

  Intersection, Continental Divide-highway to Chiriqui Grande

  Her horse was behind her, hidden among some loose boulders remaining from when the pass and road had been excavated. Digna, herself, lay forward, between two rocks, looking south through her binoculars.

  Instead of leading, Digna saw, the alien flying sleds were following the mass of the ground-bound ones that first surmounted the southern military crest. The sleds fired occasionally, but only at the rear of the groups of the ground bound, as if driving them forward. With her field glasses to her eyes she scanned the Posleen on the leading edge of the wave. She’d seen their faces — similar faces, anyway — many times on the long march back from her home. They had struck her, before, as fierce, threatening and confident, to the extent one could read confidence on such a strange visage.

  Somehow, they didn’t look confident anymore. Neither did they seem particularly fierce.

  They’re frightened, she decided. They look just like rats caught in a trap. Or maybe like wild animals caught in a drive. Hmmmm.

  Keeping low, Digna crawled back to her horse. The dirt, rock and asphalt were a pain to her breasts and belly but not so bad as a railgun shot would have been. Reaching the horse, she led it a few score meters through the pass and then mounted it, riding hell for leather for the northern military crest along which she had strung about half of her armed and able defenders.

  Digna had exactly four working radios now, including those she had scavenged in Gualaca. Two of these were with the marksmen she had stationed to either side, east and west, of the highway. These had settled in among the trees and rocks atop the crest, protected from a ground assault by the sheer rock walls rising above the gentler slope below. The third radio was back with Edilze and the artillery and mortars. Digna had the fourth, waiting with yet another descendant by a sheltered spot more or less by the road that she had picked for her command post.

  At that ad hoc command post Digna dismounted hastily and passed her reins to an armed thirteen-year-old great-great-granddaughter, waiting for just that purpose. The girl led the horse away as quickly as she was able to behind the shelter of the northern military crest. There the girl would wait, rifle in hand, until either her clan chief came to take the horse or the aliens overran her.

  From behind the shelter of a bush, Digna looked out to where the road broke free of the artificially widened pass. The ground bound aliens entered the pass tentatively and fearfully. Followed by their God King, the normals crept through, and then began to spread out once they reached the northern side.

  Digna waited until one
of the aliens’ flying sleds was into the open, behind what looked to be a thousand or so of the others.

  Calling her forward subordinates by name she ordered, “Jose, Pedro… kill the God Kings. Now.”

  Within scant seconds a few shots from the crest were joined by dozens, then hundreds, then thousands. Through her binoculars Digna saw the one sled that had come through the pass swept by a massive fusillade. Bullets sparked where they struck alien metal. In a few moments the God King riding the sled was riddled. The rifle fire continued, however, as men posted along the east-west running treeline continued to engage the few God Kings driving normals forward, south of the pass.

  From her own position, centered on her line, Digna shouted, “One magazine. Open fire.”

  The Posleen didn’t even return fire. Less still did they charge. Instead, with their point elements falling in shrieking agony and the strange thresh projectiles whistling around their ears, the bulk of the aliens turned and ran back through the pass from which they had come.

  “Cease fire,” Digna shouted, the cry taken up and passed on by her underlings.

  Turning to the nearest of her platoon leaders Digna then gave the order, “Take your men out and finish off the wounded. Carefully.”

  Preiss had expected to have to fight a human wave of panicked civilians on his way up the winding road. Instead, he was surprised to see them walking calmly, in good order, and parting to leave a path for his Hummer as he approached. He smiled, more than a little pleased, to hear the murmuring, “Gracias a Dios. Los gringos son aqui.” Thank God; the gringos are here.

  It was only a few minutes more travel before Priess understood the reason, or at least a substantial part of the reason, for the unexpected order and discipline of the refugees. Rounding a bend in the highway he came upon three men, kicking a few feet above the ground. A small, tough-looking crew of Panamanians watched them die, keeping onlookers at a distance. No sign proclaimed the crime for which the men were being hanged, but the fact that some very young and very old were being loaded onto a small pickup nearby suggested to Preiss the reason.

  One of the tough-looking Panamanians, the eldest of the crew, detached himself and walked over to Preiss’s Hummer, a young boy in tow.

  Through the boy he announced to Preiss, “Looters and thieves. They bring disorder and endanger better people than themselves. So… the rope.”

  Preiss just shrugged. Whatever worked, worked. None of his business.

  “I’m Colonel James W. Preiss, United States Tenth Infantry out of Fort Davis. And you would be, sir?”

  Still through the young translator, Tomas Herrera introduced himself, adding, “Senior Vaquero to the lady, Digna Miranda. The lady is back there,” his head twitched back toward the pass, “holding off the centaurs.”

  “Do you have any word on what’s going on back there?” asked Preiss.

  Herrera shook his head in the negative. “There were only the four radios. The lady needed them all back there. She trusted me,” he added, not without some pride, “to see these through to safety.”

  Preiss thought there was another sentence Herrera thought but failed to add. But I would rather be back there, with her, fighting.

  Preiss snapped his fingers at a private riding in the back of his open-topped Hummer. The private, whose job it was to update the colonel’s map, handed the map over.

  “Señor Herrera, can you tell me what I will find up ahead?”

  Slintogan pounded the control column of his tenar, fuming with an outrage he had nothing and no one to vent upon. The Kessentai he had sent forward with this first probe of the pass were dead. The normals were too stupid to give any account of what had happened. All he knew was what he had seen and heard for himself: hidden threshkreen had killed the God Kings bringing up the rear of the probe and a sudden fusillade had driven the normals on point into a panic-stricken flight.

  Fuming still, he contemplated the natural obstacle to his front. Were it lower, he would simply clear away the threshkreen with concentrated fire from plasma cannon. But the angle here was all wrong for that.

  “And the blasted tenar will only float so far up,” he cursed. “They might make it, some of the newer ones, but alone, without ground support, they’d be abat bait. And it would take cycles and cycles to blast away all that rock. And I do not have cycles.”

  More of the same then, only much more of the same. One nail will drive the other. And it isn’t like we have any shortage of normals to feed into the grinder.

  Forcefully, Slintogan issued his orders to the several dozen Kessentai hovering, clustered, nearby. If he couldn’t get a direct line of fire to clean off the summit with plasma fire, he could at least have the treetops blasted, and probably set them alight. Fifteen of his God Kings had that task. This time, instead of a mere five to drive the normals forward, he would use four times as many, plus a few. Even if he lost some that should leave enough to ensure that the drive didn’t lose momentum.

  Of course, momentum of the nestling into the preserved-nestling-in-an-intestine-casing grinder is, from the nestling’s point of view, not a particularly good thing.

  The aliens still looked frightened, in Digna’s binoculars, but they looked perhaps a little more determined too.

  This one is going to be tougher, she thought.

  At that point, the sky was lit by dozens of plasma bolts, streaking across. Most hit the treetops, which began to burn.

  “We have to pull back one hundred meters, Mamita,” said one of her grandsons over the radio. “It’s too hot, literally too hot, to stay here.”

  “One hundred meters,” Digna agreed. “No more. And be prepared to reoccupy on the double.”

  “Si, Mamita.”

  “Edilze, this is Abuela. Are you ready to fire?”

  The young granddaughter — well, she was young to Digna for all that Edilze was just into middle age — answered as well, “Si, Mamita.”

  “What’s your time of flight again?” Digna asked.

  “Thirty-seven seconds from you giving the command to impact,” Edilze answered.

  “Fine. I want your ammunition bearers standing by with rounds in their hands for when I call.”

  “They already are, Mamita.”

  Digna smiled, briefly, at the calm in her granddaughter’s voice. Edilze was one of the good ones.

  The thought was interrupted by an eruption of rifle fire from her line. The oncoming horde had reached maximum effective engagement range, about five hundred meters for targets as large as the centaurs, as closely packed together as they were. They were falling almost as fast as they were advancing. Return fire seemed to be going high, for the most part. Maybe they needed closer supervision from their God Kings to use their railguns accurately. Digna didn’t know. In any case, she heard few human screams of pain or calls for “Medic!”

  “Edilze, Abuela. Give me thirty rounds. Fire.”

  “Roger, Mamita. Firing now.”

  Digna thought she felt the firing of the heavy mortars far to the rear. Certainly, she wouldn’t actually hear them for several seconds more. She shouted out some encouragement to her troops, and gathered two clackers for the gringo-provided claymore mines that fronted her troops’ firing line. Mentally she counted down, “Thirty-five… thirty-four… thirty-three…”

  The Posleen must be terribly close, she felt. Two of the militia flanking her ceased fire for a moment to fix their bayonets. Digna risked a look over the parapet fronting the enemy and saw that the lead aliens were, indeed, no more than seventy-five meters away, falling almost as fast as they closed. The key word, of course, was “almost.”

  Still counting, “Eleven… ten… nine…” she squeezed the clackers.

  Instantly, thirty-four claymores detonated, sending nearly twenty-four thousand ball bearings screaming into the Posleen. For a brief moment, the alien advance stopped cold. In this respite, the firing from Digna’s defenders picked up again, seeking out lone aliens through the smoke of the claymores’ b
lasts.

  “Five… four… three… two…”

  Ahead, in the pass, heavy mortar shells began exploding right in among the tightly pressed normals. Their own shattered bones added to the flying debris that felled the aliens, right and left.

  The mortar fire lasted only for a few seconds, yet in those seconds a gap was opened up between the Posleen nail and the other nails driving it.

  In that pause, while stunned and confused normals milled about over the entrails of their peers, Digna stood up, rifle in hand.

  Ostentatiously unsheathing a bayonet to show what she wanted her children, real and adopted, to do, she affixed it to the front of her rifle.

  “Fix bayonets… Chaaarge!” she screamed, launching her less-than-five-foot frame forward.

  With an inarticulate cry, her children leapt forward as well. They soon overtook their tiny commander, reaching the confused Posleen well before she did. As stunned as they were, and terrified by thresh that fought back, the Posleen barely resisted. A few tried to fight and were gunned or stabbed down. Others stood there, helpless, while bayonets sought out their vitals.

  The bulk of them ran like nestlings from the sausage maker, pouring into the gap created by the one short blast of intense mortar fire. At the gap, the lead Posleen in the rout ran head on into the next wave following. Instead of being forced back into the fray, however, the routers simply barreled into their fellows, bellowing, snarling, scratching, biting and slashing to get away from the little demons that followed on their heels.

  The panic spread from there as the lead elements of the next Posleen wave caught it from their routing fellows. They turned about, and in turning, turned still others. In moments the entire leaderless mess was racing headlong toward the Pacific Ocean, just visible to the south.

  South of the pass Slintogan’s crest sagged.

  “Demons of shit and fire,” he whispered, “but I hate these humans.”