John Ringo: Watch on the Rhine

Another happy shudder ran through the Chesty Puller . Smiling grimly, the shudder reminding him of his last session with a woman, Mühlenkampf lifted his glass in a silent toast, thinking, and aren’t we just giving you a good fucking, you elven pieces of shit?

The destruction being visited upon the Darhel initially looked carefully planned as one by one their planetary defense batteries were silenced. This actually took several hours to accomplish, hours enjoyably spent in sweet contemplation of revenge, present and future. Though the ship had rung with the occasional hit from the Darhel shore batteries, this too had ceased.

With the defense batteries suppressed, the fleet was able to turn its attention to population centers. LTG Horida, leading a corps of Armored Combat Suits in His Imperial Majesty’s Service, grunted satisfaction as one Darhel city after another was beaten to dust. Just so were our cities scathed… at your instigation, evil kamis… demons.

The slightest of smiles informed the face of Brigadier General Dieter Schultz. “Brigadier General” he was, for the SS retained the normal rank system of Western armies and had never gone back to the arcane rank system they had once used, an inheritance of the old Stürmabteilung , or SA. The double lightning flashes still glittered on his collar, though, as his silver armband proclaimed “Michael Wittmann.” Schultz would lead the heavy armor contingent in the conquest. He looked forward to testing his brigade of E-model Tigers against the Darhel’s half-baked pseudo-robots. He was eagerly certain his Tiger, Gudrun , would make short work of them.

By Dieter’s feet rested a combat helmet of a kind not seen anymore except on parade. That helmet never left his side. Never. The helmet was filled, apparently, with dirt, a few flowers growing from it.

After one particularly vivid strike, Harz, the Michael Wittmann Brigade’s sergeant major, clinked glasses with Toshiro Nagoya, Operations Officer for Horida. Benjamin, of Judas Maccabeus, thinking of his lost homeland, his slaughtered and scattered people, whispered, “An eye for an eye… blood for blood.”

A ship’s chime rang over the intercom. “Gentlemen, time,” announced a soft female voice. That was Admiral Yolanda Sanchez, the bloodthirsty Philippine bitch — as she was often referred to, in command of the Combined Fleet, ordering the men to their landing bays.

The revels broke up, officers and senior noncoms moving briskly to join their waiting men and combat vehicles. As each left he used his right hand to reverently tap a pseudo-glass casing containing a folded suede blanket, blonde and still bright after many centuries. Above the blanket, fixed to the wall, was a Posleen head, its face twisted in an agonized rictus.

Last to leave was Mühlenkampf. Still looking at the screen in the view of which a world and a civilization died, he mused softly, but as if the Darhel could hear, “The Aldenata — idiot children — thought they were doing one thing when they fiddled with the Posleen and ended up doing something very different. They were as wrong about their tampering with you Elves. But then, given both those lessons you still thought you were even more clever and that you could change us to suit your purposes. Now it is you getting a very different result from any you planned on.

“We, on the other hand, are going to change you and we will succeed. This is because our sights are set lower. We only wish to change you from living to extinct.

“I hope you are pleased with what you have created…”

Far, far away, many parsecs in fact, the ghost of Michael Wittmann, and many another, too, smiled in his bier.

This story began on a dare, of sorts.

John Ringo created a very interesting, and very bloody, series called, generally, either the Posleen Universe, The War Against the Posleen, or The Legacy of the Aldenata. The series presupposes an alien invasion — a sort of Mongol Horde in space — and a decadent galactic civilization which is able to give Earth much needed technology to defend itself and which needs humans as soldiers to defend it, the controlling Galactics having been genetically and/or culturally manipulated into a helpless pacifism. Much of the tech described is very neat stuff, of course, but the social ramifications are staggering. This is the major reason why the reader will not see as much Galactic Technology (GalTech to the uninitiated) in Watch on the Rhine as one might have expected. The one aspect of GalTech that seems to have the greatest potential social impact is the ability to rejuvenate human beings.

John had solicited contributions from fans, of which Tom is one, for short stories and novellas to deal with areas of the Earth, and of the wider war, that his series was simply not going to cover. These were to be collected, those that met the grade, into an anthology.

Initially, Tom wasn’t all that interested, having other fish to fry (like the series John and he are planning on doing … hint, hint. Finish the outline, John). But the more Tom thought about it, and the more he considered the twin impacts of both rejuvenation and a war of extermination being waged by these aliens, the more fascinated with the idea he became.

The conversation went something like this:

Tom (who may have been drinking at the time): You know, bro’, thinking about Germany, the coming invasion and rejuvenation, they’re going to need all the trained and experienced combat soldiers they can lay their hands on.

John (who may not have been drinking at the time): Well, duh.

Tom: Did you ever think about where they are going to get them? Can you say Waffen SS?

John: Cooool. Let’s do it. I’d love it. More importantly, Jim would love it.

So we asked Jim. Then we cornered him. Then we started the arm-twisting. He kept twisting free. But we were persistent … and the rest was going to be future history.

In the course of writing this collaboration we talked about the nature of the Posleen War, aka the War against the Posleen, by the hour. Tom added a fair bit to John’s understanding, and of course John’s interactive responses (“No Goddammit, Tom, we can’t effing crucify the Greens.” “Can we hang ’em? No drop?” “Oh, all right.”) added to Tom’s basic thought-universe. Of course Tom is a Lieutenant Colonel of Infantry (qualified Ranger, Inspector General, Spec Ops Civil Affairs bubba, etc.) and takes all things related very seriously (Remember, you may not like the effing IG … but the IG sure likes effing you). John likes some jokes with his mayhem. Maybe you can tell the difference.

Initially Watch on the Rhine was “ Die Wacht am Rhein ” and was only going to be a long short story or a short novella, 45,000 words tops. But Jim wanted a book. Set in the PosVerse. We decided on doing a companion novella, “ Back to Bataan ,” that would appear with Die Wacht am Rhein and would concern the Japanese defense of the Philippine Islands against the Posleen. (Which, by the way, we may still do. Time will tell.)

But the story of Hans and Dieter and Anna and Gudrun … and, yes, even that Nazi bastard Krueger, kept growing. It grew until it ate all the time and space allowed for both stories. As it turned out, Jim liked that better. And it’s good to be king. Just ask him. (“My writers love me … pull!” “Arrghhhh!”)