by John Ringo
“And the guns?”
“Rather less than that. Still, it is quite a lot, mixed high explosive and more than one hundred rounds of canister per gun. I wish it was more.”
Digna ignored the stated wish. “You have the gun positions sited to fire both indirect and direct?”
“In most cases. Battery B will have to displace forward to cover its direct fire arc, but it won’t have to go far.”
“It is well. You have done well, Granddaughter.”
“Mamita…?”
Digna looked directly into Edilze’s worried brown eyes and answered, “No. My children are here. Yours will be too. Our clan wins or dies together.”
Hotel Central, Casco Viejo, Panama City, Panama
“As long as we’re together, Julio, it will be all right,” Paloma murmured as Diaz rolled off of her.
They were married now. Diaz had taken her to the Civil Registry for a license within days after coming out of the hospital. As it happened, the man granting the license was also a Justice of the Peace. There was the little problem of Paloma being only seventeen but, what with the war and all, the JP had proven most understanding.
“We have only a couple of days to be together, love. I have a mission scheduled for the day after tomorrow.”
She immediately tightened up and rolled to face him. “Will it be… dangerous?” she asked, in a quivering voice.
“Routine,” he assured her.
“Please, Julio, for me. Please don’t be killed.”
He smiled. “I promise to do my best.”
“We only have this couple of nights?” she asked, somewhat reassured. “Then do your best again, now, before you have to go.”
SOUTHCOM, Quarry Heights, Panama
“The LRRPs report we’ve got movement from Colombia north and west into the Darien, sir. Not too many details.”
“I need details,” Page insisted.
“Sir, they’re doing their best.”
Page scowled. The news wasn’t exactly unexpected. The timing sucked, though. Damned inconsiderate Posleen.
“Show me,” the chief of Southern Command ordered.
“We’ve got two streams of them, Boss. One moving north and the other west,” Colonel Rivera answered. “They’re joining here,” his pointer touched the map just southeast of where the Darien began, “before moving northwest into the Darien.”
“What have we got to stop them?”
“There are Special Forces teams, a company’s worth of them, scattered throughout the jungle. They’ve been arming and training Indians — Chocoes and Cuna Indians — for the last year or so.”
Page nodded absently. He’d known about the SF and the Indians. “They can’t hold the jungle against the Posleen,” he judged simply.
“No, sir, not a chance,” Rivera agreed. “And we have nothing much to help them with. Not that far from our bases around the Canal.”
“What have we got?”
“The Tenth Infantry is committed to the passes in the Cordillera Central. We couldn’t pull them out if we wanted to. The Twentieth Mechanized Infantry is committed to the counterattack. Only the Fifth Infantry Regiment is uncommitted. Plus we have about another company of SF we can send into the jungle and maybe keep supplied. Panama has nothing to give; everything is already committed to the defense and counterattack in the west. So is what’s left of our First of the O-Eighth Mobile Infantry. We do have a company of engineers, the Seven-Sixtieth, we can use to help dig the boys in.”
“Shit,” Page said.
“Shit,” Rivera echoed. “Shall I prep and send the orders to move the Fifth east, plus whatever else I can scrape up?”
“One regiment to cover at least fifty miles, Rivera?” Page scowled. “What the fuck would be the point?”
Rivera tilted his head slightly, keeping the irritation he felt from his voice. “What do you know about the Fifth Infantry, sir?”
“Nothing, why?”
“Their motto is, ‘I’ll try, sir.’ It dates from the War of 1812 when they grabbed some Brit cannon at the Battle of Lundy’s Lane. They say, ‘I’ll try.’ They do try… and they never, ever fail. The entire United States Marine Corps has one man who won the Medal of Honor twice, sir. The Fifth Infantry regiment alone has two along with another forty-two men who won the Medal once. I don’t know of any regiment in the world that has that kind of record. And, sir…?”
“Yes?”
“Little known but true: the Dictator of Panama, Bill Boyd, served for a while in the Fifth.”
“Ah, fuckit, Colonel. Send your Fifth… and even your goddamned engineers. Maybe they can buy us some time, if nothing else.”
“They will try, sir. And they won’t fail… though they’ll need every available minute to dig in.”
“Any word about what’s happening out west, Rivera?”
“I spoke to Panama’s G-2 this morning, sir, a General Diaz. They’re sending out a glider tonight and every night until the Posleen out west begin to move — clever bastards, weren’t they, to figure out that a low tech glider might get through where a high tech jet fighter wouldn’t? — and the G-2 assures me we’ll get the word as soon as the glider returns.”
Veraguas/Chiriqui Provinces, Republic of Panama
He could still scent Paloma in his mind, feel her pressed against him in his dreamings.
She’s taken it hard, poor love, Diaz thought. The death of her father was a terrible blow, though what she imagined might happen if she had managed to be the first to warn Suarez… perhaps she’d hoped to make a deal to have her father’s life spared. She won’t talk about it; won’t even think about it, as near as I can tell. And then when I had to leave? God, can so many tears come from just one girl?
He’d felt like a rat that morning, when he left her for the airfield to be briefed on his mission. She had cried and clung to him desperately. There’d been chance for only a short single phone call from the field to the hotel where Paloma was staying until they could work out something better. She’d cried then, too.
Diaz forced his new bride from his thoughts when the warning buzzer sounded that he was high enough. His hand reached out and a finger pushed a button to cut loose from the balloon above. He felt a sudden drop, then pulled back on the glider’s stick to level out and fly.
Following the roads into Posleen-held territory was a risky proposition. More than a few gliders had been lost already doing so. Julio Diaz had his doubts whether the aliens had figured out the gliders’ purpose. More likely, so he thought, they had just seen and engaged them out of general principle — the principle of he who shoots first, eats.
In any case, most of the gliders lost to date had been downed either in broad daylight or nights with high and full or nearly full moons and no rain. There was no rain expected tonight but the moon, while almost full, was fairly low on the horizon.
Small comfort that is, mused Julio. Then again, some of those gliders went down while broadcasting. Best maintain radio silence if I can.
Without fanfare and — so Julio fervently hoped — without the slightest notice at all, he crossed over the front lines along the San Pedro River and over into enemy-held territory. Though the bridge had been blown long since by the defenders, the road was still there, dimly seen by the shadow-casting low moon.
Funny that they destroy everything human except the roads and bridges, Julio thought. I suppose those help them mass forces and maneuver; that, and distribute food and arms. Bastards.
That thought, “bastards,” was repeated over and over as Diaz progressed across a landscape scoured of human life and habitation. He wondered how many hundreds of thousands of sets of human bones, women’s and children’s bones, dotted the soil below.
From time to time he passed a spot where human construction had obviously been replaced by alien, the pyramids, large and small, of their God Kings casting shadows by the moonlight.
Idly, Diaz checked his altimeter. Time to gain a little altitude, he thought, as he pu
lled his stick to the right and back to move nearer to the Central Cordillera to take advantage of the updrafts. With the mountains looming ahead of him the glider shook slightly under the uplift. Having gained nearly a thousand meters Diaz swung his craft around again to head south and then west. As the bird banked, he was afforded a look at the ground from his cockpit.
Oh, oh; what’s this?
Whether he had simply missed it before in the jungle fringing the mountains or whether the Posleen had just now begun to tramp, a stream of fire — torches he supposed; that, or some form of flashlight — flowed down from a valley nestled in the Cordillera. Diaz aimed for it.
Before reaching the river of fire Diaz looked left. There were more streams of fire, shorter it is true, forming and flowing north toward the Inter-American Highway. The highway itself was beginning to glow as the various streams reached it and turned west, merging into a great river of light. Above it, other dots of light glowed more individually. Their flying sleds, Diaz supposed.
Diaz continued on to the west. Navigation was easy now; the highway was rapidly becoming a great raging torrent of torch-bearing aliens, all moving east toward the San Pedro River. He wondered whether he should risk a call to his father, waiting behind for news of the enemy. He decided not to, not until he had gathered all the information there was.
And then Diaz reached the vicinity of what had once been known as La Ciudad de San Jose and David. This was no river. A great sea of fire and light shone bright as hundreds of rivers and streams merged together. Like a flood bursting a dam the sea began to surge eastward.
“Holy shit!” Diaz exclaimed into the radio, not thinking for the moment of proper procedures. “Any station this frequency, this is Harpy Five Nine. Get word to the Army! Get word to the G-2. For Christ’s sake call my father! They’re coming!”
Whether it was the low moon glinting from the smooth fiberglass of his wings, or whether some Posleen Five-percenter had wised to the fact that there were no birds the size of gliders and certainly none which emanated radio energy, Diaz suddenly saw streaking flashes, thousands of them, rising in front of his glider. Shit! Railgun rounds.
He pulled his stick to swerve right, out of the line of fire, and saw as many actinic streaks in that direction. Frantic now, diving and turning even while he continued to broadcast his warning — “Call my father! Call my wi — ” — Second Lieutenant Julio Diaz, Fuerza Aeria de Panama, flew directly into the fires of a number of alien railguns. He never noticed as his glider came apart around him. By that time, he was dead.
Muelle (Pier) 18, Balboa, Republic of Panama
“I’m coming, Chief,” McNair muttered in answer to the urgent knock on his port cabin’s hatch. He reached over and flicked on a light affixed to a small night table next to his bunk. He heard a constrained sobbing coming from the area of his desk. Once his eyes adjusted to the light he saw Daisy, or rather, her avatar, rocking back and forth, an arm across her chest and a hand placed over her mouth as holographic tears poured down her face.
McNair stood without covering himself. All things considered, modesty was silly in a ship that saw every motion.
“What’s wrong Daisy?”
“Lieutenant Diaz is missing… presumed dead,” she sobbed. “Somewhere over David.”
“Oh,” McNair said, suddenly downcast. “Oh… damn. He was a good kid, too.”
McNair thought about reaching out one comforting hand to the avatar, realized once again that that was futile, and instead rested the hand on the bulkhead near his bunk, lightly stroking the painted steel wall.
“Daisy, I am sorry, too. Sorry for Diaz, for his father, for you who were his friend. But that’s what war means: good young kids die. At least we can say this one is being fought for a good reason.”
The avatar nodded, tears beginning to slow to a trickle. “I know that. But it still hurts.”
“Yes, it hurts now and it will hurt for a long time to come. But we have to continue the war, and win it, or Diaz’s death will mean nothing.”
Daisy lifted bright blue eyes, all the brighter for the holographic tears. “I never actually hated the Posleen before. I killed them, yes, but that was my job. Now I hate them and want to wipe them out of the universe.”
“Just as well,” McNair agreed. “Though somehow I doubt they are entirely to blame for what they do. No creatures — no higher creatures, anyway — could evolve naturally the way the Posleen have. When I think of the Posleen and how they have turned out, I smell a do-gooder, a Galactic do-gooder.”
Interlude
Picture, if you will, a lone insect, flying aimlessly through a primordial jungle in search of food…
The grat operated off of instinct. Instinct had carried its ancestors, distant in both time and space, across half a galaxy. Instinct had brought it aboard the Posleen ship fleeing orna’adar. Instinct now carried it in search of the communal abat, the agouti-like, hive-building creatures that were its sole source of food. Where there might be abat, there would be grat. Briefly the grat hovered in his search before landing on a nearby tree.
But this is not just any jungle. Watch out! There’s a signpost ahead. This grat has just taken a wrong turn and entered into… The Darien Zone. (Insert appropriate music here… )
The tree ant popped its head out before rapidly drawing it back into its hive tree. Pheromones were released, only to be picked up by others of the colony. From ant to ant the pheromones spread. The pheromones spoke of “invader”; they spoke of food. In a short time the message reached the queen who redoubled them, adding in the chemicals that said, “Feed me; I hunger.”
From deep inside the hive, which extended well below the tree’s base, the ants began to mass at the exits. The mass of ants grew and grew until the level of concentration of the pheromones reached a certain critical level. Then the ants swarmed out.
The grat was stupid; not so stupid that it didn’t notice the beginning of the ant swarm, but stupid enough not to recognize that the swarm might pose a threat. Absently, the grat flexed its stinger and flicked it at a convenient ant. The stinger connected and pulsed a tiny dose of its venom. The targeted ant twisted itself into a C and began to writhe in a death dance.
Before that ant died, a hundred more swarmed over the grat — over its abdomen, up it jointed legs, onto its thorax.
Snip, snip, and a grat wing fluttered groundward. Now in pain itself, the unbalanced grat tried to ascend but only managed to flip itself off the tree and onto the ground. A hundred ants managed to hang on during its fall, their mandibles imbedded in the grat’s chitin, cutting through to the soft meat below.
Once on the ground the grat knew a brief moments’ respite from fresh wounds. Its remaining wing beat the ground futilely. In a circle about it the ants collected. The grat’s tiny brain, though foggy with the burning pain of the formic acid injected by the ants’ mandibles, still registered the looming harvesting machine surrounding it. It tried to right itself and rise to its feet to fight.
Before the grat could arise the ant pheromones reached critical mass again. With the grat still half on one side the circle of tree ants swarmed again and buried the grat completely from view. A hissing scream emerged from somewhere under the pile. Soon, the scream was followed by pieces of grat, being carried in an orderly fashion, single file, up the tree and down to the queen.
The Posleen normal’s genetically engineered ears picked up the scream of the grat. This was a common enough sound on Posleen worlds. Grat often went into abat nests in search of food. There was a saying among the Kessentai that the normal could not have articulated but at some basic level understood: “Sometimes you get the abat, sometimes the abat get you.”
The normal, scouting forward for the main host, continued deeper into the dank, dark, wet and miserable Darien jungle.
Picture, if you will, a lone Posleen, scouting through the jungle in advance of its clan. But this is not just any jungle. Watch out! There’s a signpost ahead…
(Ins
ert appropriate music here… )
Chapter 28
Hear the wind blow, hear the wind blow;
It is calling for him.
See the grass grow, see the grass grow;
It whispers his name.
See the fire glow, see the fire glow;
His heart is aflame.
Bayede Nkhosi!
Bayede Nkhosi!
— Margaret Singana,
“We Are Growing”
David (erased), Chiriqui, Republic of Panama
The setting sun washed the great step pyramid of the clan leader Binastarion in pale red light. In that light, the pyramid rose high over the area once known as the Parque de Cervantes. Of the park, the stores and hotels that had once encircled, the ancient church which a priest had detonated to prevent the Posleen from eating his flock, not a single trace remained. The very stones and blocks had gone into the pyramid. Only the metalled square of road indicated that here had once stood human habitation.
The time was very soon, Binastarion knew, the time when population pressures would have built to the point the People began spontaneously to march, to seek his leadership in acquiring new lands.
Walking up an interior ramp to the platform just below the summit of the pyramid, the God King looked over the normals, cosslain and few Kenstain that ran and maintained his palace. The others scrambled to get out of their leader’s way as he made his way upward. Are they looking thinner than they should? he wondered.
At the head of the ramp was a small landing. Binastarion surmounted this, then turned to walk outward to the platform that engirdled the pyramid’s square summit. Even before passing the sound-deadening electronic barrier that also served to keep the voracious local insect life at bay, the God King heard the snarling and grunting of masses of the People. He asked himself, Is it the Time, already? It is so soon.