John Ringo: Yellow Eyes

The Posleen attacks had petered out before nightfall. By dawn, the sound of firing, human firing, had grown intense.

It was always a touchy problem when friendly forces met over enemy bodies. The best solution, the one adopted, had been for the 20 thInfantry and the remnants of First of the O-Eighth to simply pull back into three battle positions and let the Panamanian divisions through the two gaps thus created. Yes, a few of the aliens had no doubt also escaped through those gaps. No matter; they would be hunted down.

Connors’ XO — no, the CO since Connors had fallen — heard a strange music coming from a couple of trucks carrying a band that passed through the gap nearest her much depleted command.

“AID, what is that music?” she asked.

The AID took a moment before it answered. No doubt it was searching the Net. “That music is ‘ Deguello .’ ”

“Meaning?”

“It’s a Moorish tune picked up by the Spanish during the Reconquista and brought over to this hemisphere. It means ‘cut throat.’ They sometimes call it ‘The Massacre Song.’ I think it’s directed as much at the Panamanians as the Posleen.”

The Posleen tenar were gone now, gone without a trace. The Marlene Dietrich look-alike avatar on the bridge wept inconsolably as the ship thrashed about over the spot where Des Moines had sunk. “My sister… my sister…”

Sidney Goldblum wanted to reach out and comfort the avatar but, of course, could not. The ship’s chaplain, Rabbi Meier, came onto the battle scarred bridge.

“Sally, is she really gone?” Goldblum asked.

Still weeping, the avatar answered, “I sense nothing below, Rabbi. Nothing. She has to be gone.”

“We’ve been here long enough, Sally,” Goldblum interjected. “We have to go search for survivors.”

Meier held up an index finger at the captain. Wait. Then he bowed his yarmulked head. “Let us go to the stern then, Sally, and say kaddish over the soul of your sister.”

The sniffling stopped, almost. Still through tears that appeared on her holographic face, Sally responded, “But she converted to Catholicism, Rabbi. Would kaddish even work.”

“Kaddish is really for you , my child. And besides, do you think that the Almighty really cares about such mundane details?”

As she had every day since the news had reached her, Marielena came to this church and prayed for her fallen lover. Soon enough , she thought, patting her stomach, I won’t be coming here alone either.

Money wasn’t going to be a problem. Scott’s Galactic Law Last Will and Testament had proven inviolable and incontestable, though his childless ex-wife had certainly tried to contest it.

Her mother, on the other hand, was proving to be something of a problem, nagging continuously at “the shame of it all, my daughter carrying a bastard.” Fortunately, her father was taking things rather more philosophically. He’d shrugged, told her mother to shut up, and answered, “Better a bastard in the family than an unemployed son-in-law. What’s more, woman, the child’s father helped save this country, to include saving your nagging tongue. The child will never hear the word bastard or you will feel my belt.”

She might someday marry, Marielena thought. But… no time soon. Her bed was lonely and cold without Scott in it. But she was in no hurry to fill it with some lesser man.

A poem had been going around the Net of late. Someone locally had changed it around, translating it into Spanish and making a few changes along the way. The poem was in the form of a prayer, she recited it now in a whisper:

In the same pew with Marielena another young woman, even more of a girl than she was, wept. Why not? The church was full of women weeping for a lost son, a husband, a father, a brother. Some wept for lost daughters, as well.

The girl was young, Marielena saw, very, very young. And her sobbing body spoke of both loss and a fear of utter aloneness. Did she have no family left? Mari had, at least, some.

In pity, Marielena sidled across the pew, closing the distance between her and the girl. Tenderly, she put her arm around the unknown one’s shoulder. “There,” Mari whispered, “there, there. It will be all right.”

Paloma de Diaz nodded her head but the tears never stopped flowing, the body never stopped shaking. “Thank you,” she whispered back in a breaking voice.

“What’s your name, child?”

Paloma told her, saying also why she had the married name, “de Diaz,” and blurting out, “But he promised to come back to me. He promised.”

“I’m sure he tried,” Mari said, in answer. “But sometimes things, important things, come up and promises, however much meant and however important, just can’t be kept. I try to tell myself that… when it gets really hard.”

“I’m going to have a baby,” Paloma whispered. “He never knew. I didn’t know myself until it was too late to tell him.” She broke out in fresh sobs.

“He knows,” Marielena said, looking at the altar. “Even if you never told him, he knows now.”

If the fighting was not ended at least the emergency was over. The Patria was restored, even expanded a bit since there were no longer any Costa Ricans to contest Panamanian occupation right up to and past the Coto River. The Posleen which had overrun the western provinces were, by and large, dead. Any Posleen left in the Darien, and there must have been a few , had either gone feral — ceased, in other words, to be more of a threat to life than the jungle itself already was — or were nothing more than ant-stripped, bleaching bones slowly sinking in the muck.

Over half a million Panamanians had fallen though; virtually the entire populations of the province of Chiriqui, as well as many of Herrera, and Veraguas were gone, plus substantial numbers of Colonenses and Ciudanos . From a people who had never numbered more than three million this was a knife to the heart.

Boyd felt the knife. He felt it at every list of the missing and presumed dead that had crossed his desk. He felt it in the open files in the ranks of the army. He felt it in the friends and cousins he would never see again.

No more. Let someone else take the responsibility. I’ve done all I can.

That wasn’t quite true. There was one more responsibility Boyd felt, one more thing for him to do.

He had already said his farewells and expressed his deepest thanks to the other American battalions that had stood and bled, from the Armored Combat Suits of First of the Five-O-Eighth and light jungle fighters of Third of the Fifth Infantry at Fort Kobbe, such as were left of them, to the heavy mechanized troops of the 20 thInfantry and the Florida National Guard’s 53 rdSeparate Infantry Brigade and Puerto Rico’s 92 nd, both of which had been moved in by ship and submarine for the mopping up after the final campaign. Fort Gulick’s — or Espinar’s — Special Forces, who had proven so critical in training the Armada , had been given a special commendation.