Posleen FanFic Read online

  Posleen FanFic

  Edited by

  John Ringo

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2003 by John Ringo

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  DOI: 10.1125/Baen.0003

  First printing, May 2003

  Food Will Win This War

  Leigh Kimmel

  Leigh is a Barfly, a regular posting member of Baen's Bar, in good standing. Her background, as it obvious from the story, is in Russian history and literature. This story very much met the standards I was looking for; it took a different approach on life during the invasion and it dealt with areas with which most people are unfamiliar.

  It's also a cracking good yarn.

  Stalin had an intense dislike of travel, and for many years he avoided visiting his mother, although she begged him to come. Only when she was very old and near death did he make the trip to Tbilisi, where his henchman Beria had installed her in the old viceroy's palace. The aging woman was delighted to see her famous son once more.

  As their visit drew to a close, she had one question she wanted to ask him. "Tell me, Soso," (even after all these years she still called him by that Georgian diminutive of his given name), "what exactly are you?"

  "You remember the tsar. Well, I am like the tsar."

  Ekaterina Dzhugashvili smiled and shook her head. "You'd have done better to have become a priest."

  Part One

  Feed My Sheep

  The supply caravan of old Soviet-made trucks threaded its winding way along the narrow ribbon of pavement through the northern Caucasus Mountains. The Georgian Military Highway had fallen into disrepair since the Posleen invasion had thrown all Earth into the turmoil of war. However, it remained the best route to Grozny, once capital of the Chechen Autonomous Republic and now one of the few remaining strongholds of human resistance in the northern Caucasus Mountains.

  In one of the middle trucks sat Dr. Nanuli Tamarashvili, a retired pediatrician lately of Gori in the Republic of Georgia. That market town on the Mtkvari River was notable primarily for having been the birthplace of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, who under the name of Stalin had ruled the Soviet Union for nearly thirty years. But Gori was gone now, fallen to the Posleen landing that had taken Georgia's central valley, and Nanuli had lost her family along with her home.

  The hard seat wasn't the best place for a woman in her seventies, but Nanuli had plenty of experience with privation. She was old enough to remember the dark days of the Great Patriotic War, and more recently she had pulled through the privations of the civil war after the fall of the Soviet Union. Her old bones might ache for days when she arrived at the forward base overlooking the ruins of Grozny, but she wouldn't let it keep her from seeing to the patients who were waiting for her arrival.

  In the meantime she had Gamsakhurdia's Georgian translation of The Lord of the Rings to occupy her. The rhythm of reading aloud to Soselo helped to take her mind off her growing soreness.

  Soselo was a quiet boy who made Nanuli think of her grandsons, who had perished in Gori and in the flight to the mountains. He rarely spoke, which was hardly surprising when one considered that he and his father Beso had been literally one jump ahead of a hungry Posleen when they'd encountered the caravan's Cossack outriders. After her own experiences in the flight from Gori, Nanuli had a good idea of what the boy probably witnessed.

  It hadn't helped in the aftermath of that fight when the Chechens had wanted to abandon the two refugees as deadweight who would only eat up valuable food and give nothing in return. To save her fellow countrymen, Nanuli had drawn on all the status afforded her by her age and her medical degree. Even now she heard more than a little grumbling among the Chechens, and it was spreading to the other Muslim nationalities.

  And we can't afford a split along religious lines when we Caucasians are barely holding out against the centaurs.

  A sudden bang ahead brought Nanuli to full alertness. Gunfire?

  Beside her, Soselo ducked, whimpered in terror. Someone in the truck ahead of them cut loose, sending bullets ricocheting off the rocks on either side of the road.

  Voices shouted in several languages for the shooter to stop. The agreement among the caravan's members was to use Russian as a common language, but Nanuli knew that one's native tongue penetrated better in adrenaline-heated situations like this.

  Beso looked up, growled through gritted teeth. "Trust the ragheads to blow a whole clip on a shadow. We'll be lucky if they don't shoot one of our own."

  In front, the Chechen fighter riding shotgun glared at him and spoke in heavily-accented Russian. "What you say? Talk so I can understand."

  Beso flinched, looked away from the Kalashnikov the Chechen had pointed at him. In his anger he'd used his native Georgian, and his tone was sharp enough that the Chechen had to know it was uncomplimentary. And probably took it personally.

  Nanuli's medkit was already in her hands when she raised her head to get a good look at the situation. No sign of an attack. but Beso had a point about friendly fire. Not to mention whatever had caused that first bang. Possibilities ran through the back of her mind, along with the most likely injuries to go with several forms of mechanical failure, from a burst radiator hose to a broken axle or drive shaft.

  Beso was just helping her over the tailgate when one of the Cossacks heeled his horse over to them. Although he carried a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder, the traditional Cossack saber and whip hung at the belt of his cherkessa.

  Nanuli's eyes shied away from the string of claw-tipped Posleen thumbs that dangled from the high cantle of his saddle, trophies of past encounters. "I was concerned there might be injuries." Russian came awkwardly to her tongue.

  The Cossack, Grisha, nodded although his lips curled downward in a tight frown. "Yes, Doctor, but it is dangerous for you to be walking about by yourself."

  Nanuli started to protest, then realized how right he was. A doctor was too valuable to risk running about unprotected. And her old bones might well shatter from a simple slip and fall that would only bruise one of these young fellows.

  Much as it hurt her pride, she accepted his offer of escort. She walked beside his stirrup as his horse ambled along the column of halted vehicles. At least everyone had gotten stopped in time; she saw no fresh dents on fender or bumper, and the people within showed no sign of injuries, just boredom festering into frustration.

  Grisha noticed the latter as well. "Enough sitting around. Top off your tanks, all of you."

  From the vehicle climbed men of every nationality of the Caucasus: Chechens, Circassians, Inguish, even an Armenian. They pulled the big gas cans from their mountings over the vehicles' rear bumpers and set to work.

  Nanuli kept a close eye for any injuries. At least the war had made tobacco almost impossible to get, so no one was smoking while handling gasoline. But there were plenty of other ways to get hurt.

  As soon as she arrived at Ataman Masuyev's command car, she saw the blown-out tire that had sent it sliding into the rocks at the side of the road. The fender had crumpled like tinfoil, but she didn't smell antifreeze, so it should be just superficial damage, and they could drive away as soon as they got the tire changed.

  Ataman Masuyev thrust his head out an open window. "Good, you brought the doctor. Isaak took a knock on
the head."

  Nanuli bit back the urge to point out that she'd come on her own initiative and Grisha had only escorted her. Antagonizing the Cossack ataman would only delay getting to Isaak, and concussions were not anything to trifle with.

  Although what can you do, with no air evac, no hospitals, no neurosurgeons?

  At least the ataman's vehicle had a wide running board which made getting in much easier for old bones. Within, a thin, hawk-nosed young man half-reclined across the back seat and cradled his head in his hands. He moaned each time the vehicle rocked.

  "Hello, Isaak." Nanuli spoke slowly and distinctly, her voice pitched low to avoid irritating him.

  The young man looked up, blinked. No sign of bleeding from the ears or blackening around the eyes, so he shouldn't have a fractured skull. The pupils were dilated evenly, which meant he shouldn't have any brain damage, although she didn't like the dazed look in his eyes.

  She looked directly into those dark eyes, hoped that he wasn't from one of the nationalities who could take direct eye contact from a woman the wrong way. "Do you know what happened to you?"

  He rubbed at his scalp, said something in a language that she couldn't follow. In addition to Russian and her native Georgian, Nanuli also knew Svanuri and Megruli, but those two were about as closely related to Georgian as Polish or Bulgarian was to Russian. Whatever Isaak was speaking, it didn't sound at all familiar.

  "Isaak, I don't understand you. Can you speak Russian?"

  He nodded, slow and careful in the manner of someone favoring an injured part. His "da" of affirmation was shaky, but at least he'd successfully switched languages. However, the mental shakeup of being injured could make one forget a second language.

  "Do you know where we are?"

  Isaak looked over Nanuli's shoulder to the open door behind her. "In the mountains."

  He left gory in the nominative plural instead of switching to the locative plural as he should have with the preposition v, but she didn't know his pre-injury level of skill with Russian grammar. Not all Caucasian languages had as complicated a case system as Georgian. More significant was his quick look to check, and that over-general answer. He should know that they were on the Georgian Military Highway, just south of Vladikavkaz.

  "So how is he, Doc?" Ataman Masuyev's voice boomed loud in the enclosed vehicle.

  Nanuli gestured for him to keep his voice down, stepped over to speak to him without Isaak hearing. "He has a concussion. A mild one, so he will recover, but only time will heal him, and until then he will need rest--"

  "Damnation, woman, I can't afford to lose my only comm tech." Masuyev jabbed a thick finger at her. "That Jew-boy's too good with electronics for this kind of crap."

  Nanuli flinched. She'd suspected that Isaak was one of the Mountain Jews of Dagestan, but she hadn't expected so crude a confirmation.

  Still, it wouldn't be productive to remind the Cossack ataman that the polite term for a person of Jewish faith or descent was evrei. Instead she spoke in her level doctor-to-angry-parent voice. "Since Isaak is your best comm tech, you will not want to endanger him by pushing him before he's recovered."

  Masuyev growled, but before he could say anything, there was a strange wailing cry from the tail of the caravan, followed by gunfire and the scream of an equine in pain.

  "Dammit, we're under attack." Masuyev grabbed Nanuli, pushed her down. "Get out of the way, woman. I won't have you killed playing the goddamn hero." He grabbed his own AK, stuffed it out the window and looked for something to shoot.

  The roughness of his action forced a gasp of pain out of Nanuli, but she didn't think he'd done her any real injury. Much as the rough handling affronted her dignity, she realized that he was right about his need to protect her from her own foolish heroism. There was simply nothing for her to do but stay under cover as best she could until she was actually needed. Even then, at her age she could hardly play the battlefield medic running under fire to the side of the wounded.

  Still, she could make herself ready. Even from her vantage point, she had a decent view of the caravan, of the yellow shapes moving up the road behind them.

  Posleen.

  Only why weren't they firing their weapons? Nanuli remembered the hiss-crack of Posleen weapons all too well from the fall of Gori, from the flight to the mountains and the terrified days of running through the Likhi Range and into the Great Caucasus, a flight that had taken her to the inaccessible fastness of Upper Svaneti. Here she heard only the rat-a-tat-tat of Kalashnikovs being fired, now in disciplined three-round bursts, and the occasional pop of a Nagan pistol.

  She noticed a set of field glasses in their case beside Isaak's sheepskin hat. An inquisitive glance to him and he gestured for her to go ahead. Maybe she was taking advantage of his infirmity, but she consoled herself with the knowledge that she had no intention of placing the priceless equipment in any greater danger.

  She focused them on the lead Posleen, then readjusted the focus, unable to believe what she saw. They weren't firing their weapons because they didn't have any, just their bare claws. They didn't even wear gear harnesses.

  Yellow fluid gouted from a row of holes that stitched across the alien's chest. All four legs buckled under it and it fell sideways onto the rocks at the side of the cracked pavement. Its toothy maw opened in a gape that might be pain, or just muscles relaxing in death. For certain other muscles were relaxing, since the mountain breeze carried a fecal stink.

  The next Posleen paused to swivel its head toward its fallen comrade, gaped and ran a thick pink tongue along razor teeth as if trying to decide whether to start eating the available corpse or continue the attack on the humans. That hesitation cost the centauroid its life, as a shot blew right through its vulnerable eye and sent pinkish brain tissue fountaining out the other side.

  The firing continued further back, along with those high keening cries, but Nanuli couldn't see anything for the vehicles and the granite outcropping around which the switchback bent. Somehow it hadn't seemed quite so sharp when she'd walked it with Grisha. She could only hope that Soselo and his father were faring well. Masuyev certainly wouldn't let her go back to check while the fighting was on, and when it was over, her first priority would be tending the injured.

  Nanuli's ears were still ringing from the last shots when a bearded man banged his fist on the door. "Dmitri Petrovich! Where's that doctor of yours?"

  The moment he spoke Nanuli recognized him, and immediately wished she hadn't. Mahmood Dudayev was a Chechen, but unlike most of his people, he did not practice the Sufi branch of Islam. Rather he was a Wahhabi, and fiercely proud of the time he had spent in a training camp in Afghanistan with a pan-Islamic militant organization, before returning to the Caucasus to fight the Posleen. He also had a big thing about purity, and according to his notions of it, just so much as talking to a woman outside his kinship circle was polluting.

  Damn, but she hated the way that man would talk to whatever male she was near, instead of speaking to her. She pulled herself up, squared her shoulders and looked him straight in the eye. "I am Dr. Tamarashvili. Where are the injuries?"

  Mahmood tensed, started to swivel his head over to look at her, only to suppress the reaction and keep his attention on the Cossack ataman. "They're strung all up and down the road. Cuts and bruises for the most part, but Vartan took a ricochet and Akhmeti got it real bad before we could take that last poska down." He used the derogatory diminutive of "Posleen" that the Cossacks had started.

  Nanuli retrieved her medkit and pulled herself to her feet. A bruise on her hip complained at the movement, but her leg bore her weight, so Masuyev's push hadn't broken the bone. She'd just be sore for a while, and in the meantime she had patients to tend. She gritted her teeth and climbed down.

  "Take me to them. Akhmeti first, and then Vartan." She hoped she wasn't making a mistake putting the Armenian second.

  The men were already dealing with the dead Posleen, cutting off each centaur's right thumb as a trop
hy, then shoving the rest of the carcass off the side of the road. The stink of Posleen blood and feces filled the air. And more than a little human as well -- even if no one had died, some of them had obviously lost control of their bowels in the fear-filled moments of the firefight.

  "Ekh, what's this?" One of the Circassians lifted the head of one Posleen, careful not to let any of the blood from the throat wound smear his red cherkessa. When he twisted the creature's head, a feathery crest ruffed up from the long serpentine neck.

  "Looks like a God-King." His companion, a Kalmyk to judge by his Tatar features and the style of his wooden-scabbarded kindjal, curled his lips in a thin smile of admiration. "Only where's his little saucer-thing?"

  "Hard to tell." The Circassian slid his kindjal out and set to cutting the God-King's head free. Such a trophy would command much honor, since God-Kings were hard to take intact. Their saucer-shaped personal ground-effect craft had a habit of exploding when hit, taking out not only the God-King but most of his honor-guard.

  "They must've been desperate, coming at us like that without a single gun for the lot of them."

  "That or ferals. Although I've never seen ferals work together like this. Wonder if you can have a feral God-King?" The Circassian twisted his trophy free with a crack of bone snapping.

  As it turned out, Akhmeti was beyond help by the time Nanuli arrived. One of the Chechens had tried to stop the bleeding but the bite gashes on the Adzaran's legs and right arm were simply too deep. Perhaps tourniquets could have saved his life, albeit at the cost of his limbs, but those would have needed to be put on within a minute after he'd been attacked. Now, whatever of his skin wasn't covered with a soup of red and yellow blood had turned white from blood loss. No pulse at wrist or carotid, and if she'd taken time to get the cuff out, probably no blood pressure either. Even now she probably could've saved him if she'd been in a hospital and could transfuse as many units of blood as it took, or if she had some of those GalTech medicines they'd talked about in the first hopeful days of preparation against the invasion, medicine the mountain peoples had never received.