Kraus-Maffei-Wegmann Plant, Munich, Germany,
27 December 2004
Karl Prael, a goateed, heavyset man of indeterminate years, closed the massive vault door against the ear-splitting and mind-numbing sounds of a tank factory on a frenzy of production. A country that had turned from producing a few hundred tanks a year to over one thousand per month could no longer worry about the niceties of noise-pollution-control measures. The workers in the plant, the much-expanded plant, put on protective ear muffs and soldiered on.
Outside of the plant, of course—this being Germany, Germany being Green, and many—though not all—of the Green leadership having sold out to the Darhel, there was a continuous noisy protest against the plant, the projects it housed, the war effort, the draft . . . the name-your-left-leaning cause.
The din inside the vault was little better.
Prael had come to the project team from a cutting-edge software company. His job was fairly easy, or straightforward at least: produce a software and hardware package to control a light-cruiser-sized tank mounting a single heavy-cruiser-sized gun. This he could do; had nearly done, as a matter of fact. But the rest of the team . . .
"A railgun! A railgun, I say. Nothing else will do. Nothing else will give us the range, the velocity, the rate of fire, the ammunition storage capability, the . . ."
Ah, Johannes Mueller is heard from again, thought Prael.
"Then give me a railgun," demanded Henschel, pounding the desk in fury, and not for the first time. "Tell me how to build one. Tell me how to keep it from arcing and burning out. Tell me how to generate the power. And tell me how to do those things now!"
"Bah!" retorted Mueller. "All of those things can be fixed. Half the problem in engineering is merely defining the problem. And you just have."
"Yes," agreed Henschel. "but the other half is fixing it and for that there is no time."
"We do not know there isn't time," insisted Mueller.
"And, my friend," said Henschel, relenting, "we do not know that there is time, either."
Mueller sighed in reluctant agreement. No, they didn't know if there was going to be time.
"If you gentlemen are finished shouting at each other?" queried Prael.
Mueller turned his back on Henschel, throwing his hands in the air. "Yes, Karl?"
"I have some news; several pieces actually. The first is this," and with that Prael began handing around copies of a small, stapled sheaf of paper. "The decision on specs has been made. This is it, and we are going to design it."
An elderly gentlemen, bearded and face lined and seamed with years spent in the outdoors looked over the sheaf. "They've rejected the idea of powering every idler, have they?"
"Yes, Franz, they have. They have also . . ." and Prael gave a brief and irritated moment's thought to the thousands of Greens protesting outside the plant, " . . . they have also rejected powering the thing with a nuclear reactor."
"What? That's preposterous," interjected Reinhard Schlüssel, the team's drive train and power plant designer. "We can't power this thing with anything less than nuclear. That or antimatter."
"We can, we must, we will," answered Mueller. "Natural gas. We can do this."
"I see they have at least accepted the use of MBA"—molybdenum, boron, aluminum—"armor," observed Stephan Breitenbach from where he sat by a paper-laden desk. That's something."
"Limited MBA, Stephan. The stuff is too expensive and too difficult to manufacture to do more than reinforce the basic metal."
Breitenbach shrugged off Henschel's comment. Something was better than nothing. And the weight saved did suggest that natural gas would be an acceptable fuel.
"There is one more bit of news, quite possibly bad," observed Prael with an evil grin. "They are sending us an advisor. Well, two of them actually. One is a man, just back from the Planet Diess, an Oberst12 Kiel. He'll be along in a few weeks at most. The other is—"
The vault door opened. In, stiffly and commandingly, stepped a tall, slender man, dressed in Bundeswehr gray under black leather, and sporting the insignia for a lieutenant general of Panzertruppen. But the officer seemed much too young to be . . .
" . . . Gentlemen, I am pleased to introduce to you Generalleutnant Walter Mühlenkampf, late of the Reichswehr, the Freikorps, la Armada de España, the Wehrmacht, and the Waffen SS. Now he slurps at the Bundeswehr trough. I see you found your own way, Herr General."
Berlin, Germany, 28 December 2004
The Kanzler had not yet come. It seemed impossible that he should be lost in this, his city.
As much as an Indowy could fume, Rinteel fumed. A complete lunar cycle of this people's time I have sought a private conversation with the ruler of these Germans. How many will die for that lack of time? How much more is the cause, are the causes, imperiled?
His human . . . guards? Yes, they were obviously guards. Even so they treated him with indifference. Strangely, this made the solid little, green furred, bat-faced form more comfortable, rather than less. Nothing on this world was better guaranteed to send an Indowy, even a brave one—and Rinteel was regarded among his people as preternaturally bold, into a panic as the sight of those bared carnivore fangs the locals used as a sign of pleasure.
Fortunately, the humans of the BND never smiled. Thus, the Indowy had only to deal with their single-mindedness, their barely suppressed innate violence. This was quite job enough.
In the presence of these barbarian carnivores, Rinteel could not even work out his frustrations with pacing. He could only wait patiently for the Chancellor to arrive.
Bad Tolz, Germany, 28 December 2004
In this out of the way Kaserne, home at different times to elite units ranging from German Schützstaffeln to American Special Forces, Hans Brasche looked skeptically over ranks of recently arrived, rabbit-frightened recruits shuffling forward in lines to be assigned to their quarters and their training units.
They look bigger and healthier than my generation did. But then I suppose they have eaten better than we did. No Depression for them, no lingering effects of the long British Blockade. The Wirtschaftswunder13 did them well.
Yet their eyes seem watery, the complexions sallow. There is no toughness in them, no hardness. Too much fat. How are we to make bricks without straw?
Hans glanced away from his charges and looked around the Kaserne. The Americans kept the old home up well. It has not changed much, thought he. Not since I was here as a boy of twenty.
"Und so, you wish to become officers of the Waffen SS, do you?" demanded the harsh looking Oberscharfsführer of the stiffly standing ranks of Junkerschule14 hopefuls.
I want nothing, thought Hans Brasche, carefully silent. Nothing except that my father not beat my mother for my failings that he attributes to her. He would have me here, not I. But for her sake, here I must be.
"To become worthy to lead the men of the SS," continued the noncom, "you must become harder than Krupp's steel, more pitiless than an iceberg, immovable like the mountains that surround us." The NCO gestured grandly at the Bavarian Alps clutching at every side.
"There is no room in the SS for divided loyalties. So all among you who have not yet left the church stand forward."
Hans, along with rather more than half his class, obediently stepped forward. From behind the Senior NCO marched forward a number of juniors—beefy men, every one of them.
Hans never saw the fist that laid him out.
That won't work here, he thought, coming back to the present for a time. These kids hardly know of the concept of a God. Unless, perhaps, it resides between their girlfriends' legs . . . or is to be seen on the television. They have no innocence . . . no naiveté. They have no symbols. They seem to have neither hope nor faith. Not in anything.
Bricks without straw.
Perhaps the general will have an answer. We have a few days yet.
Berlin, Germany, 28 December 2004
"I have the answers you have sought, Herr Bundeskanzler," Rinteel said, simply.
Long, long had the Indowy waited. Long had he been forced to push away and conceal his terror at the near presence of so many vicious carnivores. When the chancellor had finally—in secret—arrived, the Indowy was filled with relief. Here, at least was one barbarian who did not completely tower over him. Though the white-haired "politician's" smile was even more fearful than the blank stares of his guardians.
"What answers, Indowy Rinteel? What answers when I do not have even the questions?"
Rinteel forced his eyes to the chancellor's face, no mean feat for one of his people. His face twisted into the mode, Honesty in Word and Deed, automatically, though he knew the human could not recognize or understand it.
"Then let me offer the questions, Herr Bundeskanzler. Why, when faced with an invasion nearly certain to exterminate your people, does your political opposition resist every attempt to improve your chances of survival? Why, when the Posleen will extinguish most of your world and pollute the rest with alien life forms, do those most concerned with maintaining the ecological purity of your world do all in their power to undermine your defenses? Why, when the coming enemy is so powerful, are even your military leaders—some of them—so slow to push the rearmament, so almost incredibly incompetent in its execution? Why do those most in love with the notion of state control of your economy, high taxes and centralized planning, resist using these very means to assist your people's survival?"
The BND guards' faces assumed a somber and even angry mien. To this the Indowy was immune. At least they are not baring those flesh-rending fangs.
"I have considered these things," admitted the chancellor.
"Then consider these as answers," said Rinteel, handing over a human-compatible computer disk. "And consider that you should trust no one. This disk contains less than all of the information. There is someone, perhaps close to you, whose words we could not decipher."
"I understand," said the chancellor, though in truth he did not, not fully.
"I hope you do," Rinteel answered. "For, if you do not, you will have little time in which to do so."
Kraus-Maffei-Wegmann Plant, Munich, Germany, 28 December 2004
"And how long will you be here with us, Herr General?"
Mühlenkampf answered, "A few days at most, this time. And I shall return from time to time. I am, of course, always available for consultation, should I be needed. I have been studying up on modern systems ever since I came out of rejuvenation."
"Very good," returned Prael. "And added to your vast combat experience, we expect to produce something quite remarkable. Would you like to meet the rest of the team?"
"By all means. Please introduce them. And show me the plans."
"Plans first then, I think. And while I am at it I will introduce the team members responsible for each part." Prael directed Mühlenkampf's eyes to a table upon which stood a model of a tank.
"Nice appearance, anyway," muttered the general noncommittally.
"Oh, it will be more than appearance, Herr General," answered Prael. "This is going to be, by at least two orders of magnitude, the most powerful panzer ever to roll."
"We will see what we will see," commented Mühlenkampf. "Why this absurdly long gun?"
"Johann?"
Mueller stepped forward. "Because they wouldn't listen to me about a railgun, Herr General."
Prael snorted. Mueller never missed a chance.
"You must forgive me," said Mühlenkampf, "but what is a railgun?"
"My pet project . . . and dream," answered Mueller. "It's a weapon that passes electricity along two bars. The electricity creates a magnetic field. The field catches, and then propels forward at great speed, a projectile."
"This is possible?" queried the general, realizing instantly the potential of such a weapon.
"Possible," admitted Henschel, introducing himself. "It is possible, General Mühlenkampf, but not possible just yet."
Mueller shrugged. "In time. A year or so, maybe. Okay, maybe two," he admitted, looking at Henschel's scorning face. "In any case, Henschel here is right. It will not be ready quite in time. What you see, General Mühlenkampf, is a three hundred five millimeter gun, much lengthened over its one hundred twenty millimeter predecessor, and using an American-designed propellant system. Since I can't have my railgun, I am reduced to designing the recoil system for this one. Also, since the specialties are somewhat similar, I oversee the design of the suspension with Herr Schlüssel here."
"Reinhard Schlüssel," introduced the bent-over, gnomelike veteran of the German Navy. "It is also my job to design the turret for the tank. Though Benjamin here has been of inestimable value."
Mühlenkampf cocked his head. "Benjamin?"
"David Benjamin," answered the only truly swarthy man in the room. "Of Tel Aviv," he continued coldly, so as to keep a hostile note out of his voice. "I am here on loan from Israeli Military Industries. We intend to build a few of these ourselves, and to purchase several more."
The time for apologies passed before they ever became fully due, thought Mühlenkampf. None I could make would make up for anything.
Instead he answered, merely, "Very good. I have been most impressed with the design for all four versions of your Merkava panzer. Sensible. Wise. I am pleased you are here, Herr Benjamin."
The Israeli shrugged as if to say, It would please me more were you displeased to see me, SS man.
Filling the stony silence that followed, Prael said, "Indeed, you can see the ancestry of the tank in the Merkava."
"Yes," agreed Mühlenkampf, glad for any bridge over the impasse. "That pushed-back turret especially. How big is this thing?"
"The Tiger Drei," answered Henschel, finally naming the project, "Is twelve meters wide, thirty-one meters long and weighs approximately seventeen hundred and fifty tons, fully combat loaded. It is very heavily armored."
"Mein Gott!" exclaimed the general, the implications of the size of the scaled-down gun on the model finally sinking in. "What could possibly drive the need for such a monstrosity?"
"Come here, Herr General, and I shall show you the answer," answered Henschel, unveiling several models of Posleen landing and attack craft.
Bad Tolz, 3 January 2005
The general also did have an answer; though the answer was not one designed to please his nominal political masters, or—most particularly—some elements of their support.
The new recruits had been herded, cattlelike, to stand in the freezing snow in the middle of the Kaserne. There they stood, shivering and miserable in thin uniforms, unmarked save for a small flag of black, red and gold sewn on each sleeve. Suddenly, as if on command . . . indeed on command . . . from around the perimeter of the parade field lit spotlights, climbing and meeting overhead to form an arch or, perhaps better said, a cone, composed of dozens, scores, of spears of light.
The startled recruits flinched, unmilitarily, but the rejuvenated SS cadre scattered loosely around them took no official notice. Then they heard music . . . and the singing. . . .
Mühlenkampf, Brasche at his side, stood in warm black leathers under the same cone as the recruits though yet he remained apart from them by decades and even worlds. He suppressed a grin. Icy cold was his mien, as icy as the air.
Face still a mask, he asked of Brasche, "Do you know why, my Hansi, the skinheads never really got anywhere, politically, in Germany?"
Hans whispered back, "No, Herr Obergruppenführer . . ."
"Lieutenant General, Hansi. Lieutenant General," corrected Mühlenkampf, gently yet with a sardonic grin he made no effort to keep from his face. "Our masters do not like the old ways."
"Zu Befehl, Herr Generalleutnant," answered Brasche, semiautomatically.
Mühlenkampf's grin remained, becoming, if anything, more scornful still.
"The skinheads never got anywhere, Hansi," continued the general, "because this is Germany and the assholes never learned to march in step . . ."
" . . . Marschieren im Geist, in unsern Reihen mit . . ."15 sang the marching men, boots ringing on the ice and cobblestones. Even now the first veterans became visible to the neck-craning recruits as their serried ranks passed through the gates of the Kaserne. "Die Strasse frei! . . ." The song was forbidden, of course. "Ganz Verboten." But to men who had told Hitler and Himmler to go "fuck themselves" not once, but on countless occasions, what meant the strictures of a government weaker and in every way even more despised? "Die Fahne hoch! Die Reihen fest geschlossen . . ."16 began the song's last, repeat, verse.
In the ranks of the old SS sang one Helmut Krueger. How good it was to Krueger, how very good, to once again feel the blood of youth coursing in his veins. How good to march with his old comrades, to sing the old songs. How good it was to be what Krueger had never thought himself to be any other than, an unrepentant, anti-Semitic, Nazi of the old school.
Krueger dreamed, daydreamed actually, of a broad-scale return of the old days. He imagined once more the cringing Jewish, Slavic and Gypsy whores opening their buttocks, legs and lips in fear of him. The power was an intoxicant. He saw, with half a mind's eye, the cowards, suspended by their necks from lamp posts, kicking and gasping and choking out their last. Even the memory caused him to shiver slightly with delight. He heard the "Heils" coming from ten thousand throats and the sound was better than good. He remembered how grand he had felt at losing the self and joining such a godlike power. He saw the flaming towns and smiled. He heard the screams from the gas chambers and crematoria and shuddered with a nearly sexual joy.
Krueger was sure that after decades of exile he was at last coming home.
Missing his home, Dieter Schultz, aged eighteen, along with the other recruits, shuffled nervously in the cold snow. One would have thought that the boys would never have heard the songs, this being Germany, rules being rules. And, indeed, know the songs they did not. Yet they recognized them.
Dieter and the rest knew, absolutely knew, that that song, in particular, was against the law, against the rules. Soon the Polizei would come and break up this had-to-be illegal gathering. Soon, minutes at most, these damned refugees-from-the-grave Nazis would all be arrested and shortly thereafter the reluctant recruits would be sent home to mama. They knew.
Mühlenkampf tapped his left boot toe unconsciously as the column of thousands of old-young veterans even now split to envelop the boys in their charge. The music and the song changed, the veterans singing in voices and tones designed to knock birds dead at a mile:
"Unser Fahne flattert uns voran.
Unser Fahne ist die neue Zeit.
Und die Fahne führt uns in die Ewigkeit.
Ja, die Fahne ist mehr als der Tod."17
Mühlenkampf, suddenly conscious of the tapping boot, forced it to a stop. "Ah, I've always liked that one, I confess, Hansi. Why I remember . . ." yet the thought was lost, uncompleted.
With a ruffle of drums and a flourish of horns the song ended. Still, the marching feet beat out a tattoo on the icy pavement: crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch. Sparks were struck by hobnails grating on bare stone. The sparks clustered about the men's feet, adding a surreal air to the proceedings.
Brasche stepped forward to the microphone. "Men of the SS Korps . . . halt." The marching feet took one more step, then slammed to a simultaneous halt. "Links und rechts . . . Um."18 The enveloping pincers turned inward as though they were parts of a single, sentient, beast. "Generalleutnant Mühlenkampf sprache."19
Hans Brasche stepped back from the microphone, sharply, as the black-leather-clad Mühlenkampf walked forward.
Mühlenkampf's head twisted back and cocked proudly, arrogantly. "I speak first to my old comrades, who need no speeches. Well met, my friends, well met. We have shaken a world before, together. We shall shake several more worlds before we are done."
The proud head looked down its straight, aristocratic nose at the new recruits. "I speak next to those who are here to join us. Filth! You are nothing and less than nothing. Unfit, weak, malingering, decadent . . . Refuse of a society turned to garbage. Spoiled rotten little huddlers at apron strings.
"You make me ill. You make your trainers, my cadre, ill. You are a disgrace to your species, a disgrace to your culture . . . a disgrace to our nation and traditions."
Mühlenkampf's face creased with the smallest of smiles. "And yet we, we old fighters, have another tradition. We are, to paraphrase an English poet, charms 'for making riflemen from mud.'
"Regimental commanders, take charge of your regiments."
On cue, the band struck up Beethoven's "Yorkische Marsch." The icy field rang with crisp commands. Units faced and wheeled. Even the new recruits, smarting under a brief and contemptuous tongue lashing, could not help but be forced into step by the march's heavy, ponderous refrain. As a long and twisting snake, the column marched out from under the tent of light to enter the world of darkness.
As the last companies were disappearing into the dark, Brasche asked, "So you think this will work, Herr General?"
Mühlenkampf snorted as if the very thought struck him as ridiculous. "This speech? Some lights? A little insulting language? A little showmanship? Do I think these will work? Hansi, spare me. Nothing 'works' in that sense. The easy transformation, like the nonsensically—impossibly—successful spontaneous mass uprising, are bugaboos of the left, of the liberals and of the Reds and the Greens.
"Ah, but Hansi, they forget something, those Reds and Greens. Several things, really. Germany was no less decadent, divided and weak in the 1920s. I was there. I remember. Yet we shook the world in the '40s. Why? Because transformations like that are as superficial and shallow as they are easy. Those boys down there are Germans, Hansi—lemmings, in other words.
"Lemmings, they are, Hansi. Germans: mindless herd animals, at best." The brief and indulgent smile was replaced in turn by a feral grin. Mühlenkampf slapped Brasche heartily on the shoulder, adding, "But they'd rather be in a pack than a herd, my friend . . . a pack of wolves."
The boarding hordes snarled and snapped at each other as their God Kings herded them from the lighters and down into the storage bowels of the still forming globe. From one or another of the confused and frightened normals crocodilian teeth lashed out whenever followers of a different Kessentai came in range. Sometimes the needle-sharp rows of teeth drew yellowish blood and scraps of reptilian flesh before their wielders were lashed back to passive obedience.
Not for the first time, Ro'moloristen felt his own bile rise, his crest expand. Half of this was the result of dim, presentient memories of his own time in the breeding pens, a time of constant struggle and fear of being eaten alive by his siblings. The other half was more pungent.
The normals tended to lose control when upset or frightened. The crude loading and unloading, coupled with the strangeness of space flight, was more than sufficient to upset most of them and to actually frighten many, even as dull as they were. The result of that fear was a stench of carelessly dropped Posleen feces wafting up from the depths of the lighters to fill the air. In that section of the globe the loading of which it was the young God King's task to supervise, the stench was overpowering to the extent of being sickening. Still, he thought, normals are so cute, so desirable. But they are so untidy.
Somewhat less bothered by the stench they lived with daily, the cosslain—the superior normals—flanked the procession, keeping a modicum of order. Keeping order among the normals was half the reason for the flanking procession. The other half was to carry and load aboard ship individual weapons with which the normals could not be trusted entirely, aboard ship, given the stresses those normals were under.
A Kenstain20 appeared at Ro'moloristen's shoulder.
The God King gestured and a hologram of the globe appeared in midair. He gestured, again, with a claw and a section of the hologram, plus a route leading to that section, suddenly glowed brighter than the rest. "Guide this group down to here and get them into the stasis tanks," he ordered.
Athenalras held fiefs on nine worlds. The first, despite a major evacuation of the People, was already plunging itself into Orna'adar, the Posleen Ragnarok. This was the last to be loaded. From here the People would move to the new world, the one they called "Aradeen," though the locals called it "Earth."
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