Watch On The Rhine

by John Ringo

  "Can't you direct your main gun without human interface?"

  "I have that technical ability, Indowy Rinteel, but may still not fire it without a colloidal sentience to order me to."

  "How very strange," the Indowy commented, sotto voce.

  "I am not programmed to comment upon the vagaries of my creators, Indowy Rinteel."

  "Then what do you do in the event escape is impossible?" the Indowy asked.

  "I have a self-destruct decision matrix that allows and requires me to set off all of my on-board antimatter to prevent capture. As you know, my nuclear reactors are essentially impossible to cause to detonate."

  The thought of several hundred ten-kiloton antimatter warheads going off at once caused Rinteel to drink deeply of his synthesized intoxicant.

  * * *

  A few meters from Rinteel, separated by the bulk of the armored central cocoon, Prael, Mueller, and company toasted with scavenged beer tomorrow's adventure while going over plans and options.

  "The big threat, so far as I can see," commented Schlüssel, "is the bridgehead over the Rhein."

  "I am not sure," said Mueller. "The Oder-Niesse line is a sham; it must be."

  "For that matter," added Henschel, "we still have infestations within the very heart of Germany. Oh, they are mostly contained, to be sure, but if we could help eliminate one we could free up troops that could then move and eliminate another."

  "The problem is," said Prael, "that none of the troops containing those infestations have any heavy armor to support us. If we get caught alone in a slogging match we . . . well, Brünnhilde has only so much armor, and not that thick really anywhere but on her great, well-stacked chest."

  "There are A model Tigers to provide support along the Oder-Niesse," observed Mueller.

  Prael consulted an order or battle screen filched by Brünnhilde's nonpareil AI and downloaded for his decision making. "Yes, Johann, but so far as we can tell they don't need us. The whole Schwere Panzer Brigade Michael Wittmann is there, and they are not alone. Along the Rhein it is a different story. The retreat from the Rheinland was disastrous. Many Tigers were lost. We are most needed there, I think."

  "So, then," said Henschel, the oldest of the crew, "it is to be 'Die Wacht am Rhein.'"43

  * * *

  Rinteel was somewhat surprised to hear a faint singing coming from the open hatchway to the battle cocoon. Not that singing was unusual, of course. A few beers . . . a little schnapps . . . and the crew was invariably plunged into teary-eyed, schmaltzy Gemütlichkeit.44

  The surprise was the words and tune. He had never heard this song before, and he would have bet Galactic credits that he had been subjected to every German folk and army song since he had joined the tank's crew.

  The words were clear, though, and the melody compelling. Rinteel heard:

  A voice resounds like thunder peal Mid clashing waves and clang of steel. The Rhine, the Rhine the German Rhine, Who guards today thy stream divine? Dear Fatherland no danger thine, Firm stand thy sons along the Rhine. Faithful and strong the Watch, The Watch on the Rhine . . .

  * * *

  Wiesbaden, Germany

  Mühlenkampf's HQ

  18 June 2008

  Below his window, marching by the city's streetlights, the weary but upright battalion of "Landsers"45 sang:

  They stand one hundred thousand strong Quick to avenge their country's wrong. With filial love their bosoms swell. They'll guard the sacred landmark well. Dear Fatherland, no danger thine . . .

  Where was this spirit? Mühlenkampf thought bitterly, looking down from his perch. Where was it back when it could have made a difference?

  Don't be an ass, Mühlenkampf, the general reproached himself. The spirit, deep down, was always there. No fault of those boys that their leaders were kept from bringing it out.

  The general sighed with regret, contemplated the economic disruption of the Posleen infestations . . . contemplated, too, the increasing shortage of ammunition, fuel and food. And now, he sighed, spirit is all we have left in abundance.

  Mühlenkampf turned away from the window and back to the map projected on the opposite wall. Slowly, all too slowly, he was pulling those units of his which had covered the withdrawal from the Rheinland back to a more central position. Casualties? Who could number them? Divisions that had been thrown into the battle at full strength were, many of them, mere skeletons with but a few scraps of flesh hanging onto their bones. The replacement system, now running full tilt, could add flesh . . . but it took time, so much time. And there was only so much flesh to be added, so much meat available to put into the sausage grinder.

  Some of that sausage-bound flesh, in the form of the infantry division marching to the front to be butchered, sang under Mühlenkampf's window.

  Looking into the marching boys' weary but determined eyes, the general felt a momentary surge of pride arising above his sadness and despair. Perhaps you are lemmings, as I judged you, my boys. Perhaps you are even wolves when in a pack. But you are wolves with great hearts all the same, and I am proud of every one of you. You may not see another day, and you all know it, yet still you march to the sound of the guns.

  While Mühlenkampf watched the procession below, the sun peeked over the horizon to the east, casting a faint light upon the marching boys.

  * * *

  Tiger Anna

  Oder-Niesse Line, Germany

  23 January 2008

  The rising sun made the fog glow but could not burn it away. In that glow, standing and shivering in the commander's hatch, Hans glowered with frustration. Something is so wrong over there, and I have not a clue what it is.

  Hans had, four nights previously, ordered a renewal of the nightly patrols. This was not, as in days recently past, to help to safety Poles fleeing the aliens' death machine. Instead, he had put his men's lives at risk for one of the few things in war more precious than blood, information.

  Afoot where the water was shallow enough, by small boats where this was possible or by swimming where it was not, the patrols had gone out, eight of them, of from eight to ten men each. Hans had seen off several of these himself, shaking hands for likely the last time with each man as he plunged into the river or boarded a small rubber boat.

  Yet, as one by one the patrols failed to report back within the allotted time, Hans' fears and frustrations grew stronger.

  Other commanders along this front had had much the same idea. Though Hans didn't know the details, over one hundred of the patrols had gone out. He didn't know, either, if even one had returned. Only brief flare-ups of fighting, all along the other side of the rivers told of bloody failure.

  * * *

  Success is sweet, thought Borominskar as reports trickled in to him of one slaughtered group of humans after another. What effrontery these creatures have, to challenge my followers on land fairly and justly won by them.

  "Fairly" might have been argued. "Justly" no Pole would have agreed with. But that it was "won" seemed incontrovertible. The deaths of one hundred human patrols, nearly a thousand men, admitted as much.

  * * *

  David Benjamin admitted to nothing, especially not to the notion that the war was hopeless or that the patrols were doomed

  An experienced officer of the old and now destroyed Israeli Army, he took the ethos of that army to heart: leaders lead. In a distant way, Benjamin knew that that lesson had not been learned so much from their deliberate and veddy, veddy upper-class British mentors but from the unintentional, middle-class, German ones. Add to this an officer and NCO corps that was more in keeping with Russian practice than Western—many officers, few NCOs of any real authority—and there had really been only one thing for David to do.

  The patrol he led had crept in the dense fog to near the banks of the Niesse River. There they had inflated their rubber boat, then carried the boat in strictest silence to the water's edge. The men, Benjamin in the lead, had hesitated for only a moment before walking into the forbidding, freezing water
. The shock of that water, entering boots, leaking through even thick winter uniforms, and washing over skin, had rendered each man speechless. It was as if knives, icy knives, had cut them to the heart.

  But there was nothing for it but to go on. As the lead men found their thighs awash they had thrown inboard legs across the rubber tubing at the front of the boat. The rear ranks still propelling the boat forward, the second pair had thus boarded, then the third, then the final. As each pair boarded the men took hold of short, stout paddles previously laid on the inside of the rubber craft.

  Finally, the boat drifting forward, Benjamin gave the command in softest spoken Hebrew, "Give way together." The men dug in gently with the oars, quickly establishing a rhythm that propelled the boats slowly forward.

  Up front, David and his assistant patrol leader, a Sergeant Rosenblum, used their paddles also to push away any of the sharp bits of ice that might have damaged the boat. Once, when the horrifying image of a burned and frozen Posleen corpse appeared out of the fog, David used his paddle to ease it over to sink into the murky depths of the stream.

  Once gaining the far side, Benjamin leapt out, submachine gun at the ready. Meanwhile Rosenblum pushed a thin, sharpened metal stake into the frozen ground, made the boat's rope fast, and then helped the others ashore.

  The last two men were left behind to guard the boat, the patrol's sole means of return to friendly lines.

  Rosenblum and the other four waited briefly while Benjamin consulted his map and compass—the Global Positioning System was long since defunct—and pointed a direction for Rosenblum, taking the point, to follow.

  The patrol passed many Posleen skeletons, but few full corpses. David and the others pushed away thoughts of their families back in lost Israel, pushed away especially thoughts that those families were, most of them, long since rendered like these Posleen corpses and eaten.

  Benjamin faintly heard a horrified Rosenblum whisper, "Not even the Nazis . . ."

  Past the broad band of corpse-laden Polish soil the patrol emerged into an area of frozen steppe. Here, Benjamin elected to return to the edge of that band to rest for the day.

  Normal camouflage would have been a hopeless endeavor. Instead, staying as quiet as possible, the men created three small shelters of humped-up Posleen corpses and remnants of corpses. Under these, at fifty-percent alert, the six men slept and watched through the short day of Polish winter.

  Many times that first day of the patrol they heard the growls and snarls of Posleen foragers. Twice, the foragers came close enough to make out faintly in the fog. On those occasions, sleep was interrupted and the men went to full alert.

  "Something is bothering me about them," whispered Benjamin to Rosenblum.

  "What is that, Major?"

  Rosenblum thought for a moment, trying to determine just what it was that seemed wrong. Then it came to him, "They are looking for the merest scraps of food, rotten food at that. It is as if they were starving."

  "Well," answered the sergeant after a moment's reflection, "it is winter, after all. The harvest . . ."

  "They can eat anything, to include the harvest gathered a few months ago, and to include any winter wheat still standing. They can eat the grass and the trees and Auntie Maria's potted geraniums. But why should they when there were so many Polish civilians trapped or captured? It doesn't seem logical somehow."

  * * *

  Though the increasing light told of a sun risen halfway up to noon, the fog still held the front in its grasp. A few dozen half frozen men had made it back by now, never more than one or two per patrol, though. The men told Hans' intelligence officer—when they could be made to give forth something like intelligent speech from frost-frozen lips and terror-frozen minds—that it had been hopeless. The Posleen were too thick on the ground, too intent, to penetrate through to their rear and whatever might be lurking there.

  As he had for many a day, Hans Brasche cursed the fog in his mind.

  * * *

  The God King's hand stroked the warm, light blanket covering him. He had not thought to send out counterpatrols. Indeed this whole human intelligence gathering activity seemed to him faintly perverse. It was not the Posleen way to skulk through the night and fog, avoiding detection. Rather, the People rejoiced in the open fight, the deeds done before the entire host for the Rememberers to record and sing of unto future generations.

  But, happy instance, on this occasion, necessity had provided what Borominskar's own brain had not. Searching for scraps of food amidst the slaughtered of the previous battle, his host had inadvertently provided a thick screen against the threshkreen's cowardly snooping. And, hungry as they were, the scattered bands of the People had every reason to concentrate on the loose bands of threshkreen wandering the steppe. Only thus could their hunger be assuaged given the severe rationing imposed on the host by Borominskar's decree.

  It was nice to see something working for a change.

  Well, the Path is a path of chance and fortune, after all . . .

  * * *

  Fortune favors the bold. Benjamin remembered that as the title of some motion picture he had seen once with his wife, in happier times. It was true then, and was no less so now.

  At nightfall the band set forth again to the east. There were fewer Posleen patrols once past the strip of corpses from the prior battle. What bands there were were easily detectable from a distance by the light from their campfires. These Benjamin and his men skirted, taking a wide berth. These diversions David also recorded on his map.

  The next sunrise saw the patrol twenty kilometers deep into Posleen-controlled territory, at a desolate and deserted little Polish farming village. Not that the people had abandoned their homes, no. Their fleshless skeletons dotted the town's streets and littered its dwelling places. But the souls were fled, the food was gone. All of Rosenblum's scrounging revealed nothing more nourishing than a few bottles of cheap vodka.

  Benjamin's men subsisted that day on their combat rations, German and thus as often as not containing despised pork. Well, many Israelis did not keep kosher. And for those who did? Necessity drove them to eat what was available.

  Perhaps the vodka, parceled out, helped overcome their dietary scruples.

  * * *

  Harz drew the duty of feeding the commander. Filling a divided tray with a mix of Bavarian Spätzle, rolls and butter, some unidentifiable greens and some stewed pork, one hand grasping a large mug of heavily sugared and mildly alcohol-laced Roggenmehl46 coffee, he stepped onto the one-man elevator that led to the other topside hatch and commanded, "Anna, up."

  Still listening and peering into the gloom, Hans seemed not to notice as Harz emerged from the automatically lifted hatch and left the tray beside him. Harz stood there for a while, leaving Brasche alone with his thoughts. Finally, he made a slight coughing sound to get the commander's attention.

  "I heard you emerge," Hans answered.

  "Lunch, Herr Oberst," Harz announced.

  "Just leave it there, Unteroffizier Harz. I'll get to it when I have time."

  "Sir, I must remind you of the wise Feldwebel's words. 'Don't eat . . . '"

  Interrupting, Brasche finished the quote, " . . . 'when you're hungry, eat when you can. Don't sleep when you're tired, sleep when you can. And a bad ride is better than a good walk.' I've heard it before, thank you, Harz."

  "Yes, sir. But it is still good advice."

  "Very well, Harz. Just leave it. I'll see to it in a moment. Return to your station."

  An order was an order. Harz didn't click his heels, of course. That habit even the reconstituted SS had not readopted. But he did stand at attention and order, "Anna, down." The hatch eased itself shut behind him.

  Alone again, Hans picked up the tray. The Spätzle, the vegetables, the rolls and butter he ate quickly. Then, pulling the collar of his leather coat tighter around him, and grasping both hands around the steaming mug, he peered once again into the fog.

  Hans' earphones crackled with the inte
lligence officer's voice. "Sir, they want you down by the river."

  * * *

  With outstretched hand a cosslain offered Borominskar a fresh haunch straight from the slaughter pens. It was a meager thing, not more than half a meter long, by threshkreen measures. But the God King had decreed no meat for the cosslain and the normals, and scant meat for the Kessentai. The thresh must be saved for the nonce.

  * * *

  Had they looked, the setting sun would have shone bright into the eyes of the traveling group of Posleen. That might have been all that saved the patrol from the keen alien senses. Had the accompanying Kessentai, flying five or six meters above and slightly behind the party, checked his instruments they might have told him there were wild thresh about.

  What can they be saving them for? wondered Benjamin, at the sight of yet another small band of humans, apparently healthy and well fed, being herded to the east by Posleen showing ribs through thinned torsos. Any sensible, any normal group of Posleen would have long since eaten those prisoners and gone looking for more.

  Even amidst Poland's flatness there were interruptions: waves in the soil, trees, towns. It was from one of these, another deserted town atop a low, slightly wooded ridge running north-south, that the Israeli patrol watched the slow progress of the Poles and their Posleen guards.

  Not one man of the patrol was of direct Polish ancestry. None but would have, had they delved into Polish-Jewish "relations" over the preceding several centuries, felt bitterness or even hate. Yet Benjamin spoke for almost all when he announced, "We're going to free those people, tonight."

  "There are twenty-four of them," cautioned Rosenblum, "and a God King. Pretty steep odds, boss. And how are we supposed to move one hundred people thirty kilometers back to the river and then ferry them across, without getting caught? Major . . . I'd like to help them but . . ."

  "But nothing. We are going to do it. And I know just how."