Chapter 11: We're Getting Drunk Tonight
Headquarters, Army Group Reserve, Kapellendorf Castle, Thuringia, 17 December 2007
Hans shuddered with the cold. Though snow lay all around, covering castle, land and ice in the moat, the sky was, for the nonce, clear. Christmas carols—sung by a local group of schoolchildren for the benefit of the headquarters staff—carried far in the dense, icy air, ringing off castle stone and leafless tree.
Take a shot on the second sentence!
Battle cruiser Lütjens, Sol-ward from Pluto's orbit,
17 December 2007
The ship's commander, Kapitän Mölders, could not help but be amused at his ship's station. Being a part of Task Fleet 7.1 was unremarkable. But, along with another battle cruiser, the Almirante Guillermo Brown, and half a dozen of the ad hoc frigates converted out of Galactic courier vessels, being an escort for Supermonitor Moscow certainly was worth a minor chuckle. What would Lindemann or Lütjens have said? he wondered, thinking of those two brave and worthy German seamen who had gone down with the original Bismarck early in World War Two. Mölders would have chuckled too, except that he, Moscow, those half dozen frigates and two more task fleets were racing at breakneck pace into a death absolutely certain.
Take a shot for gratuitous and inappropriate German; Fleet is not part of any national organization and would use Captain. Take another shot for celebrating the Bismarck and her crew despite it being an absolute waste and cockup.
On Lütjens' view-screen Mölders saw a brilliant new sun appear for a long moment. A message from Moscow poured into his ear through an earpiece kept there. Mölders' eyes widened, then turned suddenly soft.
"Gentlemen," he announced in a breaking voice to the bridge crew, "that sun was the Japanese battle cruiser Genjiro Shirakami. It has rammed an enemy globe and detonated itself. Supermonitor Honshu believes that that globe was completely destroyed."
Take a shot for the racist kamikaze attack. Also, good job wasting a battlecruiser escort in that rather than a lighter vessel that would've done the job as well. From a purely literary standpoint, a call back to HMS Glowworm or USS Johnston or USS Samuel B Roberts would've worked a whole hell of a lot better.
Back on Earth, the light show between surface to space railguns and the Posleen reminds Hans of a certain time back during the initial Arab-Israeli wars. The Arabs have managed to penetrate the Israeli lines on a commando raid,
Fierce cries of "Allahu akbar" resounded from a shallow streambed to the north as the volume of fire began to pick up from that direction Not quite sure why, Hans began moving in that direction. Half dressed, more importantly perhaps half undressed, shrieking women began to streak by in their flight. He called out repeatedly, "Anna? Anna?"
One Israeli girl shouted to him, "Anna stayed behind to fight and cover us!" Hans moved out, alone, into the night.
He found her spitting and cursing defiance at the three Arabs who had her pinned and spread-eagled for a fourth crouching between her legs, tugging at whatever covered the lower half of her body. His experienced finger caressed the trigger four times, then a fifth to make sure of one still-twitching, towel-headed form.
Take two shots, one for blatant racism and one for it being
in the form of an actual slur. Rape as drama is such utter crap as writing anyhow. Anna bitches him out a bit for never using her name, proclaims that it wouldn't have killed her, and mentions that she was a camp whore for the guards at Ravensbruck. Hans, for his part, states that he always cared for her and that the reason that he couldn't have anything to do with her is that he has an SS tattoo. She doesn't take this well and runs like hell.
Conveniently, the prototype B model Tiger is ready on the night of the renewed Posleen invasion. Inconveniently, there's only the one prototype and no crew available.
The shining behemoth positively gleamed with menace. Where Anna and her sisters dazzled, the new model stunned. From the tip of her railgun to the back of her turret, from the top of that narrow, sharklike turret to the treads resting on the concrete floor, from the twin mounds housing close-in defense weapons on her front glacis to the slanted rear, Tiger III, Ausführung B was a dream come true.
Take a wild guess as to what those mounds get compared to later on in the book. Given that, and the obvious compensation issues with the gun, I'm gonna call this the Futa tank.
"No," corrected Henschel, "for we do not even have a crew for her."
"Be a shame to just let her be captured or destroyed to prevent capture," said Schlüssel. "And it is not entirely true that we do not have a crew. We, ourselves, know her as well as any crew could, and if we alone are not enough to man the secondary weapons . . . well . . . she is much more capable, her AI is much more capable, than the A model's."
"You are suggesting we steal her?" asked Prael.
Mueller smiled. "Not 'steal,' Karl. Just take her out for some combat testing is all. And I used to be a very good driver."
So apparently these few men (and one Indowy, Rinteel having teamed up to help design this for lack of anything better to do after the Darhel bailed) are the sole personnel in the tank factory and they are unable to get any volunteers at all to help man the secondary weapons. Nor could they possibly get a bus or helicopter with an actual crew to come over. Instead, a bunch of engineers, one of whom may have any military experience, are going to go on a joyride through a battlefield with her.
As far as forms of suicide go, this is a fairly elaborate one.
Hans considered some folksy wisdom on the subject: "Quantity has a quality all its own," and Stalin's famous jibe, "Quantity becomes quality at some point in time."
The Communist bastard was right about that one, too, thought Hans, remembering distantly, the sight of burning individual Panthers and Tigers, a collection of half a dozen or more Soviet machines dead before them, while endless columns of Russian T-34s passed the burning German machines by.
Take a shot for Soviet hordes and individual Tiger/Panther stronk. Note that he does not refer to the early war scenes where a solitary KV-1 or KV-2 would force German forces to halt while knocking out every tank thrown at them.
Meanwhile, in France, the Posleen are chomping at the bit to get to them:
The command post shook slightly with the steady vibrations of the fort's three automatic cannon firing from their retractable turrets. On the screen the fire of the short-range guns, short ranged because the turrets were too small to permit much recoil, drew lines of mushrooming black clouds through the enemy host, leaving thousands of destroyed Posleen bodies in their wake. Each gun was capable of sending forth several dozen one-hundred-thirty-five-millimeter shells per minute by virtue of their unique chain-driven feeding system. All of that was done automatically except for feeding of the shells into the conveyor system that hoisted them aloft. That job was done by dozens of sweating, straining men in ammunition chambers far below.
This is like an eldritch abomination for engineers. Seriously, the tubes should be literally melting within a fairly short time frame. Naval guns get around this by using water cooling and also not firing at that high of a rate for a sustained period of time (if for no reason other than the fact that the
reason you're firing that quickly means you don't have a sustained period of time left if shooting it doesn't work). There's no reason really for the land based artillery to firing at such a high rate either: ICM shells (cluster bombs, but for artillery) will wreak absolute havoc upon the Posleen. Seriously, this is a red leg's wet dream. A horde of soft targets, packed all close, coming along preregistered paths that you've had months or even years to build up in such a fashion as to channel them precisely where you wish them to go, no need for air space deconfliction, chock full of ammo, and free reign to simply wipe out grid squares? What more could they want?
But alas, both authors were infantry grunts and Kratman shows all the signs of being an incredibly stereotypical one. Thus we are not treated to the glories of artillery, the natural bane of the infantryman, in all of her majestic splendor, but instead have this dreck to wade through. We also have the
fascinating logic by Kratman that, despite what is obviously a massive rebuild of the Maginot Line defenses, we remain with the original gun caliber size. Why it is not increased to 155mm or 4.5" or 5" rapid fire guns bought from the British, Americans, or Italians, is unfortunately something that shall remain an eternal mystery. Instead, all of this engineering work is done for the sake of a long obsolete gun caliber.
"And they're working," he said aloud. "Killing the alien bastards in droves. And the damned government just had to throw that away by refusing to cooperate with the Germans."
"Sir?" queried Merle's aide.
"We could have had a couple of Boche armored corps here with us," answered Merle. "We could have had a few score infantry divisions too, to help us hold this line. But, no. Impossible. We would only let them help us if they were willing to let us dictate policy. Tell me, Francois, if you were the Germans, if you were anyone, would you let the government of France, any government of France, dictate policy to you?"
"Certainement pas," answered the captain, with a wry—and very cynically and typically French—grin. "Who could be so foolish?"
Behold the idiot ball! Look upon its crystal surface! Is it not shiny and smooth, free of any perfection?
This does, of course, raise the question of where the French armored corps and infantry divisions are. Presumably they are on the line, which makes the question the question of German ones rather meaningless: There's only so many troops you can put on so much frontage. Also, what are the Germans doing? Are they just sitting back, twiddling their thumbs, or are they occupying defensive works of their own?
This conversation is interrupted by a giant boom, courtesy of Posleen space to surface weapons.
As Francois replaced the ancient telephone on its hook he said, "Battery B. It's . . . gone. The aliens somehow penetrated all the way down to the ammunition storage area. Hardly anyone escaped. The area's been sealed off to prevent fire from spreading."
Now Merle's face paled. "My God, there are twenty thousand civilians down there below the ammunition for that battery."
I swear, this is the engineering equivalent of a toddler putting a fork into an electrical socket to see what it does, except that you've let the toddler loose in a high voltage substation and covered them in grease. Why in the name of all that is good and holy would you put the civilians underneath the magazine rather than literally anywhere else? That's on top of deciding to ignore a century's worth of experience in the need for insensitive munitions because, yes, magazine explosions are a thing and took out several French ships as a result.
This proves the last straw for the French commander, who says to hell with the government, "We haven't had a decent one since Napoleon the First, anyway," prompting De Gaulle to rise from his grave as a revenant bent upon revenge for the slur. They then call the Germans and put them under their command, encouraging local sectors to do the same, in exchange for aid and opening up an evacuation route for the French civilians.
The Germans reaction to this is, of course yes, while showing in the meantime that they have done literally no planning at all. There are in fact no open lanes for French troops or civilians to retire through; they have to be made from scratch and there somehow aren't the engineering assets to close more than two of them again. They also ask for the Division Charlemagne to come to the aid of the French which, if its with the rest of the SS troops, is about 400km away in the middle of Germany. Not sure why the Germans get a pass on piss poor planning while the French don't.
The men in the dank and malodorous depths of the fortress still noticed her, even under the pale, flickering light. Though well past the bloom of youth, and despite the deprivations and terrors of the last nine months, Isabelle De Gaullejac was still quite a fine-looking woman beneath her grimy, unwashed face. Cleaned up, and when she could clean herself Isabelle was fastidious, those men would have called her "pretty"—if not beautiful.
Still, there was beauty and then there was beauty. Standing, Isabelle had a bearing and obvious dignity that was proud, even almost regal. Whatever she lacked in classic line of features her girlish shape and posture up made for, and more.
The pride was personal. The regality was perhaps the result of genetics, for she came from a family ennobled for over five hundred years.
Again, Kratman can only think to describe women in terms of their physical appearance. And look, while I might be a monarchist, the Baen love affair with monarchy is just a bit weird and creepy. I'm not sure how genetics are really supposed to play a role in this either, much less draw "the confused, the lost, the helpless and hopeless to her as if she were a magnet" as Kratman writes, given that the nobility had been abolished for several generations at this point. But hey, somehow our viewpoint French character is a member of the extreme upper class, descendant of 1% of the 1%, and grew up in medieval castles, with her childhood home being, of course, being a millennia old "hunting castle" belonging to King Henry the Fowler, founding of the German Ottonian dynasty. Why this Frenchwoman would've been growing up in a German castle is an excellent question, but of course geography and sensible worldbuilding are very difficult topics for Kratman, so perhaps we should cut him some slack.
Division Charlemagne arrives, somehow managing to make a division move in only a single day (Kratman showing, once again, that logistics is not only not his strong point, it's not his anything), and like any right thinking person, she wants to spit on such horrid abominations of humanity. She manages to restrain herself and takes her children and herself on what is supposed to be a twelve mile hike to German lines.
Finally, we have the continual end of chapter Posleen viewpoint:
"It is their blasted fortifications," Ro'moloristen said, bitter, helpless fury boiling in his heart. "From this miserable hole called Liege, to another place they call Eben Emael, to here facing this Maginot line, we are trying to break their weapons by hurling bodies at them."
"Can we get through? In the end, can we beat our way through?" asked Athenalras.
The young God King's crest erected. "We can, my lord; we must! For something is becoming ever more clear. If we do not exterminate this species it will exterminate us! They are too good, too brave and above all too clever. With fewer numbers and worse weapons, infiltrated and betrayed by their political leadership, attacked with devastating power from space, they are still nearly a match for us. I have some sympathy for these thresh, yes, a degree of admiration, too. But give them as little as ten years of peace and the existence of these thresh dooms our people."
Seriously? First the Maginot Line, now Liege and Eben Emael? Is this supposed to be World War II in reverse or something? How can Kratman have absolutely no creativity whatsoever on this? It's almost obscene just how bad the worldbuilding and whatnot are in this. And of course we have the annoying and terrible Baen staple trope of humanity as magical science nerds, rapidly catching up to and overpassing everyone effortlessly in all matters scientific. Yawn.
On a housekeeping note, this will be going on hiatus the 16th as I move cross country. I may or may not have another chapter before then, but it will be a couple weeks after that most likely as I drive a couple thousand miles and get settled in to a new job and city.
