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  More than the courage of that first soldier — Oberstleutnant Brasche, though the boy didn’t know that, Schüler was amazed — or perhaps better said, shocked — at the reaction of the men following.

  * * *

  Krueger didn’t like Brasche, not one bit. To the old Nazi, his commander seemed ambivalent, perhaps even weak. It was not anything Brasche had said, actually. Rather, Krueger had sensed an undertone of deep disapproval whenever he had regaled the new boys with tales of the old days.

  But, affection or not, when Krueger saw his commander fall to the ground beneath the flailing fists and lashing feet of the long-haired rabble at the gate, he saw not a weak or even a non-Nazi. He saw a comrade in danger. Krueger raised his club overhead, turned over a shoulder and shouted:

  “At ’em, boys!”

  * * *

  Muscle and bone augmented by the same process that had returned the octogenarian Brasche to full youth, Hans’ fists leapt and flew like twin lightning bolts. Wading into the crowd, he strode over a medley of bleeding, tooth-spitting, choking, bruised and gagging leftists. Behind him, the singing grew louder and closer.

  He hoped it would grow very loud, very close… and very soon.

  A woman, tall even by German standards, stood before him, defiantly. Defiantly, too, the woman lifted her chin and tore open her shirt, baring her breasts and daring the colonel to shame himself by striking a woman. Brasche drew back a fist to strike… and stopped. He couldn’t do it.

  Sadly for him, neither that woman, nor the shorter one who threw her arms about his legs, felt the same sort of restraint. Legs fouled, Brasche lost his balance and fell. He neither saw nor felt the booted foot that connected with his skull, sending him, briefly, out of this vale of tears and into another.

  * * *

  The wind was from the west, carrying with it a stench that Leutnant Brasche at first could not identify. The young officer walked gingerly, even after a long hospital convalescence. The burn scars on his legs were still stiff and tender, cracking and opening on the slightest pretext to ooze a clearish crud. His concussion, also, continued to plague him with nausea and fuzzy mindedness.

  The sign at the train station had said “Birkenau.” The name meant little to Hans, except insofar as it might mean a break from the endless horrors and deprivations of the Russian Front. Even those men he had spoken to at the front had had little comment other than that this camp, along with the others, were places where badly wounded SS men might have a few months or weeks of peace serving as guards before being fed back into the cauldron.

  To the southeast of the station platform Hans saw a camp that seemed, somehow, and even at a distance, a little neater, a little daintier perhaps.

  “What is that?” he asked of the SS man who met him on the platform, likewise a comrade sent — though earlier — for a healing break.

  “The women’s camp,” that man answered. “There is another one much like it just past. Decent places to get laid if you can afford the price of a bar of soap, a toothbrush, or a scrap of food. Or you can just order them to perform… so I am told.”

  “Who are we holding there?”

  The other man shrugged, “Jews mostly. Also Poles and Gypsies. Some others. All enemies of the Reich… so they say. In any case, come along Leutnant Brasche. I’ll introduce you to the commander, Höss.”

  Silently the two walked north to the comfortable SS barracks, Hans’ meager baggage ported by an impossibly slender, shaven-headed Jew. The stench grew worse, much worse, as they drew nearer the SS compound.

  Hans still could not identify the smell. And then he felt a cold shiver run up his spine. It smelled like his tank… after he had been blown clear. In a brief moment of relative lucidity before he was evacuated he had smelled something much like that, albeit heavier in diesel fumes.

  “What is that?” he asked. “That godawful stench?”

  “Jews, Leutnant Brasche,” his newfound comrade and guide answered, ignoring, as did most SS, the arcane system of ranks inherited from the Stürm Abteilung. “Jews. We round them up. We starve them. We work them half to death. We gas them and then we cremate the bodies just west of here.”

  “Mein Gott!”

  “There is no God, here, Brasche,” said the other man. “And being here makes me think there is no God anywhere.”

  Hans grew desperately silent then, remaining that way until he was ushered into the presence of his new, temporary, commander. Hans knew little of Höss. That little, however, included that the commander was, despite current duties, a highly decorated hero of the Great War, a veteran of the Freikorps and, at heart, a combat soldier. This knowledge informed Brasche’s actions.

  Standing at the front of Höss’ desk, Hans thrust out a stiff-armed salute, “Heil Hitler, Leut’… Oberstürmführer Hans Brasche reports.”

  Höss ignored the slip, his eyes taking in the new Iron Cross, 1st Class, glittering at Brasche’s throat. “We can certainly use you, Brasche. I am short officers and — ”

  Hans interrupted. Desperation to see and learn no more than he already had lent him boldness. “Sir, the front needs me more. I am healed enough. I wish to be returned to my old unit, the Wiking Division, to serve our Fatherland and Führer there.”

  Höss regarded Brasche closely. No, there was no hint on the boy’s stiff face of anything but a profound sense of duty. The commander nodded. “Very well, Brasche. I understand the call of the front completely. It will take a day or two to prepare the orders. But I will send you back to your division. Good lad. You’re a credit to the SS.”

  * * *

  Dieter Schultz was no fanatic. No more so was his friend Harz. But when they saw their commander fall to a treacherous, underhanded attack, even the hated and despised Krueger became not too vile a man to follow into the fray.

  The boys waded in, an unstoppable mass of swinging clubs, smashing fists, and stomping boots. Those who fell before them were given no quarter, but kicked senseless, in some cases to death. Singing among the first groups stopped to be replaced quickly by sobbing, shrieking and begging Reds and Greens.

  “No mercy, boys!” shouted Krueger, exultantly if unnecessarily. “Break their bones!”

  * * *

  “Mein Gott,” exclaimed a wide-eyed Schüler at the scene of carnage spreading before him. Already the disordered mass of protesters was fleeing in panic. Already the soldiers were reforming to pursue, while formations to the rear helped their own battered comrades to aid while taking time to further kick and pound the fallen protesters.

  A young woman — trampled by the panicking crowd — staggered by, her face half covered in a sheet of blood. Schüler approached to lend what aid he could. As he did so he heard the girl mutter, over and over, “This is impossible. Unbelievable. Impossible.”

  He draped her arm over his shoulder and began half carrying her to the presumed safety of the nearby town of Paderborn. Still the girl continued to repeat, “Impossible.”

  Although willing, and more than willing, to help, at length Schüler grew weary of the refrain.

  “What is your name, Fräulein?” he asked.

  She paused, as if trying to remember, before answering, “Liesel. Liesel Koehler.”

  “What is ‘unbelievable,’ ‘impossible’ about this?”

  Her arm still draped over his shoulder, Liesel stopped, bringing them both to a halt. She seemed to struggle for the words and concepts.

  At length, when he had forced her back to movement to escape the rampaging soldiers, she continued. “It is impossible for people to act like those men did. They just can’t have. It is impossible that our good intentions did not prevail here today. It is impossible that we are about to be invaded. What intelligent species could possibly act the way they say these ‘Posleen’ do? The universe simply cannot be set up that way. It is impossible.”

  Schüler said nothing. Yet he thought, “Impossible,” you say… and still the soldiers acted as they did. Impossible for good intentions to b
e for naught. And yet they were. Why then is it impossible for these aliens to act as we are told they will? Because you insist on denying it? Is it that you cannot see the world or the universe as it is? How much else are you wrong about, Liesel, you and all your sort?

  * * *

  Dieter Schultz and Rudi Harz, leading their men to and through the town, came upon a young man, half carrying a young woman. Their instincts and orders, heightened by the days events, were to crush these two. Yet they seemed harmless, the man burdened and the woman bloody.

  “What happened to you two?” asked a suspicious Harz.

  The young man held up one open-palmed hand in a sign of peace. “She was trampled by a panicked crowd,” he lied.

  Harz and Schultz exchanged glances and lowered their clubs. Harz said, “It is not safe for you two here. You should go.”

  Schüler nodded but then asked, “Where is the nearest recruiting station? And what unit is this?”

  Schultz considered briefly and then gave directions. He answered, simply, “Forty-seventh Panzer Korps. Why?”

  Schüler answered, “Because I think I have been wrong about some important things. ‘Impossibly’ wrong.”

  Neither Harz nor Schultz queried any deeper. Schüler continued on his way, carrying Liesel. He deposited her at the first medical aid station he came upon. Then he continued on.

  In a few minutes he had come to the Bundeswehr recruiting station for the town of Paderborn. The window was cracked, not smashed. Over the cracked glass, silver paint dripped from a crude set of twin lightning bolts. A sergeant stood inside, bearing a club.

  “My name is Andreas Schüler. I wish to join the 47th Panzer Korps.”

  Sennelager, Germany, 21 July 2005

  Mühlenkampf sat alone behind a massive desk dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, his division and brigade commanders standing before him. To their rear, at the conference room’s double-wide entrance, likewise stood two sets of complete, but unmatched, armor from the mid-fifteenth century. The walls were hung with battle flags going back to the late eighteenth century. On the floor and lining the walls rested standards, eagles atop wreaths atop hanging red, white and black, gold-fringed, banners.

  The banners were newly made. Each bore double lightning flashes. Within each eagle-bearing wreath was some other unique symbol, a curved sun wheel here, there a key with a lightning bolt through it, here a clenched and mailed fist. One standard bore a stylized letter H; another a stylized letter F.

  No unvetted civilians were ever permitted to see the banners.

  “Frundsberg?” began Mühlenkampf, conversationally, naming the division rather than its commander, Generalmajor von Ribbentrop. Mühlenkampf considered Ribbontrop an absolute weenie, a posturer, a knave and a fool.[28] Only the man’s seniority as an SS officer, and his modern political connections, had seen him in command of a division. “Frundsberg, why do you suppose that we were allowed to be assaulted here in our camp? Why were riot police not available in sufficient strength to counter such an obvious and massive move?”

  The questions were rhetorical. Mühlenkampf didn’t wait for an answer. “Hohenstauffen, what is wrong with our country? Jugend, why has every Korps in the armed forces except for ours been sabotaged? G von B, why are so many young men exempted from the call to duty? Wiking, why have some elements of the government attempted to sabotage both us and the Kriegseconomie?”[29]

  Finally resting his eyes on the only battalion commander present, Mühlenkampf asked, “What is the problem here, Hansi?”

  “I do not know, Herr Generalleutnant,” admitted Brasche.

  “I know,” said Ribbentrop, confidently. “It is the Jews.”

  Mühlenkampf snorted his derision. “Nonsense, Ribbentrop, you pansy. There aren’t enough Jews in Germany anymore to make a corporal’s guard. They are the least influential group we have. I wish we had some more. The Israelis at least can fight.”

  Shaking his head, Mühlenkampf continued, “Forget the Jews, gentlemen. Our problems are home grown. The chancellor is… all right… I think. But beneath him? A Christmas cabal of red and green and some other color I cannot quite make out at this distance. It might be black as deepest midnight, as black as the outer reaches of space.”

  Mühlenkampf stood and took a thin sheaf of papers, copies actually, from his desktop. These he began to pass out while still speaking. “We are rapidly coming to the end of our most intense training period. From now on we might relax, if only a little. I think, even, that some of the men might benefit from a period of leave. I want you to start granting leaves to deserving men, up to fifteen percent of the force at any given time.

  “Those papers contain the names of those I most strongly suspect of being our foes. You might let the men see those names before they sign out of the camp,” finished the commander, returning to his seat.

  Berlin, Germany, 15 September 2005

  Though the Darhel lord did not require it, Günter stood stiffly erect before the massive desk behind which the lord sat. Günter was, after all, a German.

  The lord’s face was impassive. His eyes wandered, looking everywhere but at the bureaucrat’s own face. Words, heavily tinged with the sussurant lisp caused by the alien’s sharklike teeth, were spoken as if to a party not present.

  “This heavy fighting vehicle project has not been stopped,” observed the Darhel. “The rejuvenation of the German people’s fiercest warriors has been allowed. Sabotage of their fighting body has not been completed to standard. My superiors will require explanations of me. I have no sufficient explanation of this failure on the part of my underlings.”

  Though the office was cool almost to the point of unpleasantness, still Günter’s face bore the sheen of a cold sweat.

  An annoyed and frustrated tone crept past the Darhel’s lisp. “Explanations will be required.”

  “My lord,” stammered Günter, “these SS simply will not listen or obey. We order them to do or not do certain things and they ignore us. Political leaders who see things in the proper way, as I do, are run out of their camps barely ahead of gangs of uniformed thugs.”

  “Pay might be withheld,” conjectured the Darhel, distantly, eyes closing and a slight shudder wracking his small body. “Food rations withdrawn. Punishment inflicted. Bribes made.”

  “All have been tried, my lord. Nothing has worked. And no less than eleven of our supporters in the Bundestag have disappeared under suspicious circumstances, two or three after each effort. Few right-minded politicians seem to have the courage to act in the face of this threat.”

  “But, in any case, my lord, can’t your superiors understand the great good that has been achieved? Of thirteen panzer Korps, fully a dozen have had their training sabotaged through propaganda, insistence on the rights of junior soldiers, withholding of vital supplies and equipment, and rigorous application of environmental regulations. Moreover, this grand tank project has had its armor limited. Nuclear propulsion and armament have been refused. Surely these things weigh heavily against such minor failures.”

  “Perhaps,” agreed the Darhel, reluctantly. “And yet we have seen and must remember how often your people have managed to avoid their inevitable position within Galactic civilization by slipping through even smaller cracks.”

  Interlude

  Bin’ar’rastemon the Rememberer’s voice rang through the assembly hall. “In the beginning — as the Scroll of Tenusaniar tells us — the People were few, and weak, and powerless… and easily impressed. So it came to be that when the Aldenat’ came upon them, the people worshiped them nearly as gods.

  “And godlike were the powers of the Aldenat’. They healed the sick. They brought new ways to farm, to feed ourselves. They brought a message of peace and love and the People heard their words and became as their children. The Aldenat’ brought wonders beyond imagining.”

  “Beyond imagining,” intoned the crowd in response.

  “And the people flourished,” continued Bin’ar’rastemon. “Th
eir numbers grew and grew and they were content in the service of their gods, the Aldenat’.

  “Yet, in time, some of the people questioned. They questioned everything. And always the answer of the Aldenat’ was the same: ‘We know, and you know not.’

  “The people who asked, the Knowers, complained, ‘The planets you have given to us cannot support our growing population.’ The Aldenat’ answered, ‘We know, and you know not.’

  “The Knowers asked, ‘Is there not a better way to move from star to star?’ The Aldenat’ answered, ‘We know, and you know not.’

  “The Knowers observed, ‘All of life is a struggle. And yet you have forbidden us to join in that struggle. Are we then, even alive?’ The Aldenat’ answered, ‘We know, and you know not.’ ”

  Again the assembly recited, “They said they knew, and they knew not.”

  Bin’ar’rastemon rejoined, “They knew not.”

  “And those of the People called the ‘Knowers’ rebelled in time. And there was war between and among the People. And the Aldenat’ knew it not. And there was slaughter. And the Aldenat’ admitted it not. And there was fire and death. And the Aldenat’ turned their faces from it, seeing it not…”

  Part II

  Chapter 5

  They came into normal space spitting fire and death. They were met in the cold, hard vacuum by Task Fleet 4.2, Supermonitor Lexington and her American crew in the van. The Lexington hurled back death with defiance. Likewise with nuclear weapons, antimatter, kinetic energy projectiles, and high-energy plasma.