Fiction: The Evil Possum/ Beer War Battle Demo!

 I've ended up on a break from this blog that I was going to let go a bit longer, but I decided to come back with a repost of something I already tried and hilariously failed to plug on my beautiful, useless Wattpad page, a battle demo for a new adventure of the Evil Possum! This is, in fact, for the Beer War story line I already posted one demo for. If you read it, this might make slightly more sense. Maybe. And yeah, this is what No-Hands' enemies were always like...

The machine gun emplacement looked like an exploded egg. Its concrete shell was caved in and bowed out. Within was carnage, so blackened and charred that the organic could not be distinguished from the inorganic. The most misshapen form of all was what finally sat up. It was a possum, species Didelphis sapiens, by name Heinrich Hilfiger, 40 centimeters tall. Bloodshot eyes came wide open as he sat up and hissed. He shook off the soot and dust that covered him, revealing a gray and black pelt only somewhat charred. In a moment, his eyes fixed on a machine gun, miraculously intact. He looked at the end of a belt still in his hand, then he began to wind it around himself. Momentarily, he had a doubled bandoleer over his chest, a belt wrapped twice around his waist and a loose end thrown over his shoulder. He threw three drums into a shoulder bag, one as large as the other two together, and slammed another large drum into the gun. It was a total of 600 rounds, enough for 30 whole seconds of fire. For good measure, he stowed two spare barrels. He examined the gun, and found half the bipod missing. He hissed and knocked the remainder off with a sharp blow. Only then did he emerge, the gun at his hip. He saw a figure even taller than himself, already receding. He all but strangled his own words as he snarled, “Nicht est Konig!!!” Then he opened fire.

No-Hands turned his head before he heard the cry. There was just time enough to choose whether to run left or right. For better or worse, he ran right, toward a basement loading dock for the warehouse. He stayed just ahead as the adversary behind him fired a barely controlled stream of fire. A final volley knocked his prosthetic leg out from under him, and he tumbled and rolled where the ramp dropped below the level of the pavement. Hilfiger loaded and emptied another drum blindly, while No-Hands slid down the ramp toward the open loading door. Directly behind him, a half-second volley disintegrated one of the barrels lined up just inside, spilling beer across the floor. Hilfiger loaded a second drum. He finally leaned into view, peering over the rail. No-Hands returned fire with a rifle longer than he was tall. With both eyes, he might have felled his foe then and there, but his snapped shot merely tore through the railing. Heinrich dropped out of sight, while No-Hands retreated to what cover there was among the barrels.

At least two more gunmen added their own fire, driving him further down the ramp. However, only Hilfiger ventured to approach, firing a score of bullets at a time. He gave a snarl as he paused to replace not only the drum but the visibly glowing barrel. The latter ejected from an opening in the side of the perforated housing with a hard metallic clang. He allowed it to clatter to the pavement. Already, he had the replacement in hand and sliding in. No-Hands fired his revolver twice as the foe once again revealed himself. This time, Hilfiger confidently let fly, without slowing or hastening his descent down the ramp. Three more barrels burst apart on the loading dock floor. Behind them, two whole stacks came tumbling down as another volley cut through the middle tiers.  No-Hands retreated from the cascade, into a warehouse floor lined with racks of beer barrels three and four high.

An appreciable fraction of a centimeter of beer splashed underfoot as Heinrich Hilfiger stepped onto the warehouse floor. A leaking keg came rolling toward him, spilling beer behind it. He stopped it with his foot. Another came flying from the right. He blew it apart in mid-air. He leaned around the nearest rack of barrels and emptied the rest of his final drum in the direction from which the barrel had come. A dozen barrels and more trickled and poured, adding to the fluid. Hilfiger calmly pressed his back against the rack. He played out one end of the belt that wrapped his body before he loaded it into the machine gun with an audible “chunk” of the cocking handle. His ear twitched at a second metallic sound. He dropped to the floor just as No-Hands fired his rifle point-blank into the other end of the line of barrels behind him.

The first barrel burst in the center and at both ends, rupturing another barrel in the other half of the rack beside it. No-Hands gagged and coughed at the resulting spray of suds and splinters, so he could not have seen if there had been time the resulting trail of destruction. Another ruptured catastrophically. A third had one or both ends blown out. A fourth was left intact by a fluke as the bullet dropped below it and ricocheted off the metal frame of the rack. The projectile went on through three more barrels before it burst out the far end, straight over the foe’s head. Hilfiger spat out beer as he rose up on hands and knees, then squalled as more poured down on his head. He whirled and fired around the rack. Another barrel disintegrated on the far end of the next rack. Over his head, the leaking barrel burst, spilling what remained of its contents on Hilfiger’s head.

Hilfiger held his fire. The sound of leaking barrels and sloshing beer came from all around. Then there was a louder splash as No-Hands loped deeper into the warehouse, past one line of racks to a third and final one. Hilfiger ran after him, through beer that had reached his ankles. No-Hands’ own saucer-like ears swiveled, triangulating the path of his pursuer. For a moment, he leaned around the rack he had just reached, his rifle at ready. Then he hissed and retreated yet again, just before two scores of bullets chewed into the rack. Hilfiger continued firing as he made his way down the line. No-Hands managed to fire one shot. The barrel it struck burst. Hilfiger jerked his head back just as the far end of the one beside it blew out still intact. Yet again, he took a spray of suds to the face. The bullet ricocheted off the next rack. Hilfiger dropped to a crouch as the unseen projectile went winging through the warehouse, finally bursting a keg on the far side of the floor.

Heinrich Hilfiger reached the far end of the floor, wading through beer halfway to his knees. By then, half the belt at his waist and the bandoleer over his left shoulder had disappeared. His tail swished behind him, stirring up a trail of ripples. He squalled in triumph at the sight of the door to a loading dock, closed and securely locked. He took a position directly in front of the door, next to a column of stacked barrels. He looked one way and then the other, but there was no sight nor sound of his opponent. He hissed and gripped the shroud of the gun. He squalled and drew back his hand. He cursed as he hastily ejected the overheated barrel, tossing it behind him. He turned, befuddled, at a splash and simultaneous metallic clang. No-Hands stood at point-blank range, holding the barrel in the pincer that served as his right hand.

Both possums dropped their jaws as they roared. No-Hands swung the glowing barrel. Hilfiger staggered from the blow, his face scalded by the heat. He countered with the replacement barrel in his hand, catching No-Hands on the tufted flanges of his chin. The only known specimen of Archididelphis invicta took a step back as he raised the revolver already in his hand. Hilfiger’s tail wrapped around his massive wrist like a whip, deflecting two shots into a barrel. Hilfiger slammed the barrel into his gun as No-Hands rushed to close the distance, with a third again the mass of his wiry frame. Another round from the revolver destroyed the padlock on the loading gate. Hilfiger’s tail lashed for No-Hands’ throat. Then Hilfiger screeched in triumph as the barrel went home with a ching. He promptly fired a volley into a barrel behind him. Three more came tumbling down. No-Hands’ raised arm somewhat reduced the force of a barrel that bounced off his high brow. With his pincer, he flung open the gate… revealing a trailer full of barrels backed up to the gate. That was when Hilfiger opened fire.

A veritable avalanche of barrels rained down on both combatants. No-Hands managed to retreat while Hilfiger took the brunt of the downpour. He paused to open his revolver for reloading. A wild volley blew the weapon out of his mechanical hand. He turned to see Hilfiger scramble out from under the barrels, even as more came tumbling down. He ran once more, and Hilfiger finally held his fire as he pursued, instead playing out more of the belt. The pursuer fired a short volley before No-Hands disappeared between two racks. He zagged left and then right, just ahead of a score and half a score of bullets. Directly ahead lay a third gate, a counterpart to the one through which he had entered. A volley from behind was cut short. A single shot from the rifle blew it halfway open. A swing of the rifle butt backed by No-Hands’ momentum knocked the left door off its hinges. “Linkshander!” Hilfiger called out. No-Hands turned back, to see his foe load the other end of a broken belt into his weapon. Simultaneously, he loaded another round into his rifle and fired.

It was an incendiary round.

No-Hands grabbed the bottom rung of a guard rail to haul himself up, ahead of the wall of blue flame that erupted through the loading gate. He vaulted over and dropped to the pavement as the barrels that had not been destroyed burst or burned, prolonging what would otherwise have been a short and relatively cool blaze. Only then did something else rush up the loading dock. It was a nearly unrecognizable form awash in flame, racing blindly forward. As it ran, it cast aside a weapon and a belt of ammo that already popped like a chain of fire crackers. No-Hands only shook his head as he tracked the figure toward its clear objective, a polluted sluice pond. It became all too clear how ill-considered it was when Heinrich Hilfiger dived straight into the deepest part. The surface of the pond itself lit up in a sheet of admittedly short-lived flame.

“You were never my equal, Hilfiger,” No-Hands said, “only my opposite. You still came closer than most.” Then he picked up the machine gun and slung it over his back.

Futures Past special: Was the Landkreuzer practical/ feasible/ sane???

 

As I write this, I am in the third week of a break from blogging. I decided that this was the time and place for something different that I had really been considering all along, a post on history and tech. This particular post will be on something I already covered in a Youtube rant, the Landkreuzer project, and whether giant land vehicles ever have and ever will be viable.

Now, the facts of the project mentioned will really be only a prologue here. At some point during World War 2, there was a request within Nazi Germany for designs for a tracked vehicle or vehicles weighing over 1000 tons, reportedly at the request of the Reich’s dictator. Everything from there has been unclear, particularly the extent to which any of it was taken seriously. At any rate, two major designs with nominal designations emerge in the lore. One is P1000, a tracked chassis mounting a battleship turret with 28cm guns. The other is the P1500, a self-propelled version of the actually built 80cm Gustav railway gun. And this was the extent of “super tank” development in real life.

But, of course, the idea has taken on a life of its own in science fiction. Even before the first tanks were fielded, H.G. Wells portrayed very large armored vehicles in “The Land Ironclads”. In the 1960s, the concept took on new life with Keith Laumer’s Bolo series, which portrayed the titular battleship-sized, AI-driven tanks with “hard SF” realism. Giant tanks and tank-like vehicles continued to appear in a range of subgenres and media, like The Legacy of the Aldenata, Warhammer 40K, and the Kenner Megaforce toy line. I personally threw in my hand with Aliens Vs. Exotroopers, featuring the 10,000-ton mobile lab Omega Aleph. Meanwhile, real life intermittently matched fiction with the development of giant tracked vehicle like NASA’s “crawler” and the Bagger 288 mining machine.

So, was all this ever “realistic”, either by the minimal definition that such vehicles can be built and function or in the stricter sense that they could have a useful purpose in war? On the first question, the answer must be a qualified yes. Vehicles like the Bagger 288 have exceeded 200 meters in length and 10,000 metric tons in weight. Given this precedent, there is no reason to doubt that human industry could build terrestrial military vehicles as large as naval craft if sufficient demand arose. On the second question, the real question becomes one of definitions. Of course, one can imagine a far future or alternate universe where battleship-sized craft launch ICBMs or Harrier jets or railgun slugs able to reach outer space. But does this meet the definition of a “tank”? This is where things get complicated, and this is where we can consider something that was actually built, the Maus tank.

The Maus, in brief, was an experimental tank developed and built from 1941 to 1944, principally by Ferdinand Porsche. It was the furthest development of Nazi Germany’s “superheavy” program. The final prototype weighed 188 metric tons, more than three times the size of a Tiger I and six times the size of a T34.  This made it the largest terrestrial military vehicle ever built, though it never saw combat. Both a 128mm anti-tank gun and a 15cm howitzer appear to have been considered for armament, though only the former is known to have been fitted on a working turret. Tests showed that it would run reliably, to the dismay of vocal opponents of the project in the Wehrmacht. However, its highest reported or plausible speed was 20 km per hour, and its weight posed severe problems for existing infrastructure. This was not, however, the reason that this was an obvious dead end I am annoyed even to have to talk about.

To see why the Maus was not workable as a tank, we must consider the problem of armament.  It is an observable fact that tank armament has always plateaued around 12cm, and the exceptions serve to show why this was the case. The KV-2 was a Soviet attempt to put a full-powered 152mm howitzer in a rotating turret on an existing heavy tank chassis, but this strained the base design so severely that it was reportedly prone to tipping over. On the Nazis’ side, the Sturmtiger/ Sturmorser mounted a mindboggling 38cm rocket launcher in a heavily modified Tiger hull, but it was universally classified as a self-propelled artillery piece rather than a tank. Finally, the much later Sheridan light tank mounted a short-barreled 152mm gun originally intended to launch a missile. Though this weapon was much lower-powered than that of the KV-2, it still produced severe recoil that could reportedly lift the lightly-built vehicle off the ground. The utility was further limited by low ammunition storage capacity. In light of this running problem, the bottom line for the Maus was that it had more than three times the weight of a more ordinary armored vehicle, but even with the 15cm gun, it could not offer more than twice the caliber or killing power of such a vehicle.

That is the practical problem, which might have been overcome. The deeper one is theoretical. The conceptual role of a tank is offensive and linear, which in turn means engaging an enemy at relatively close range. The noted 12cm limit for tank armament is very much the upper limit for what is necessary or useful in this role. Beyond that, you are transitioning to indirect fire, a jump as fundamental as that from a battleship to an aircraft carrier. There is conceptual and tactical room for a hybrid “howitzer tank” that can do both to some degree, as long as the fairly specific flaws of the KV-2 and Sheridan are dealt with. However, when the range of a vehicle’s primary weapon exceeds 16km, the best protection is to be at least as far from enemy forces of any size. If anything larger than a reconnaissance vehicle formation is close enough to engage with direct fire, let alone do so from behind, something has already gone wrong.

And that brings us to by far the most actually interesting superheavy vehicle of World War 2, the Karl. This was unarmored platform for a 60cm howitzer originally intended to demolish the Maginot Line, ultimately used at the siege of Sebastopol and the Polish uprising. At 11.4 meters long and 125 metric tons, this is the indisputable but unacknowledged record holder for the largest fully self-propelled vehicle ever used in open warfare. (And no, the claim that the Maus might have been used in an improvised last-ditch defense against the Soviets would not change that.) Its chief defect was that it was more movable than mobile, with a top speed of 10 kilometers per hour, and depended on rail to move any distance. The latter limitation specifically prevented its use in the particularly insane plan to demolish as much as possible of Paris before the German army withdrew from the city.

With this frame of reference, what becomes clear is that the  P1000 was a non-starter, even factoring in calculations that the vehicle as designed would have been far more than the nominal 1000 (metric???) ton weight. Putting a turret on a vehicle this heavily armed was simply redundant, while full armor would inevitably be too much and not enough: 10 or 20mm of plate would be enough to protect the crew from small arms fire, but even the armor of a Maus wouldn’t stop concentrated bombing. The P1500, on the other hand, was in the realm of the remotely sane. The Reich had already built not only the Gustav railway gun but more prosaically sized artillery like the famed and feared “Anzio Annie”, a 283mm railway gun actually of about the same caliber proposed for the P1000. With that frame of reference, we can at least figure out how big such a thing would really be.

That does bring us to some daunting considerations. The Gustav was over 47 meters long and weighed an astonishing 1,350 metric tons, obviously very close to the nominal 1500 tons proposed for the Landkreuzer equivalent. It also had 8 distinct sets of wheels. Anzio Annie, officially the Krupp K5, came in at 218 tons, still well over half again the weight of a Karl, carried between two sets of wheels. The Karl itself offers both a plausible means of construction and an “eyeball” range for size: Just strip down a few Karl platforms to no more than 100 tons each (for some reason, no precise figures for the platform minus gun are in circulation), and use it to replace at least one set of wheels on a railway gun. We can therefore extrapolate a weight of 400 to 500 tons for a self-propelled Anzio Annie, which is not a lot more than the mass for the two Maus tanks known to half been built. For the actual P1500, on the other hand, we are definitely looking at not less than 4 and possibly more than eight Karls worth of additional mass. That puts the minimum plausible weight somewhere between 1800 and 3000 (metric) tons, which is extreme but not entirely unfeasible.

That leaves the essential question, what could such a monstrosity actually do? In fact, we can at least deal with the obvious objections. If you’re already over 400 metric tons, there would be no reason not to throw in a few machine guns and light cannon for self-defense, which would be enough to deal with infantry and perhaps lone aircraft. It would still probably need to use the increasingly bombed-out rail infrastructure for most of its movement, but it wouldn’t be a sitting duck if there was a hole in the tracks. As for the usually cited problem of Allied bombing, it could be camouflaged (and for that matter partly dismantled) against discovery by routine raids and reconnaissance flights. If it came to that, it would be so much bigger than anything else that simply hiding in plain sight takes on a counterintuitive element of plausibility. After all, if your enemy’s common airmen don’t already know you have a vehicle the size of warehouse with the armament of a battleship, a weird platform with a giant tube on top isn’t going to look that much more interesting than a tank factory on the left or a munitions train on the right.

On the other hand, there are problems that don’t go away so easily. The existing weapons systems of the Third Reich were already running into the practical limits of their technology, evidenced conspicuously in the short barrel life of the Gustav guns. At the same time, there were technologies that were still unavailable, notably practical submunitions. (As I go into in the video version of this, the most significant experiment on that vein was, of all things, the United States’ surreal “X Ray” program to develop bat-deployed explosive devices.) Finally and most fundamentally, as seen with the Karl and the Sturmtiger, the Third Reich was simply running out of useful targets that weren’t already bombed to rubble. Given enough lead time, they could have turned a formations of Landkreuzers on the urban centers of Leningrad and Stalingrad, the concentrated armored forces at Kursk, and even the landing craft at Normandy. But without a nuclear bomb they didn’t have or chemical weapons even the Austrian painter feared to use, they probably weren’t going to do more damage than they could have with the same tonnage of Stukas, Panther tanks and V2s.

So, what of the future of the super-heavy military vehicle? The self-evident reality is that, for as many times as the tank has been proclaimed “dead”, there is still nothing better for what tanks are actually meant to do. Indeed, even tasks well outside a tank’s role, from carrying troops to launching ICBMs, have proven feasible for vehicles not greatly different in size and configuration. To get to a vehicle ten or more times the size of a tank, we would have to envision either a new mode of combat, an exceptional new threat, or both. Short of slugging it out with aliens in low orbit, any mission parameters we could envision would probably lead to a vehicle very different from what we would call a tank. Again, the tactical and conceptual leaps could be as great as that from a battleship to an aircraft carrier (maybe literally with VTOL aircraft and now drones in the equation), and we are free to admit we may not know what’s on the other side until we get there. The responsibility of the futurist is to think outside the box, and we are definitely due for something more than a battleship on tracks. Dream big, and reach for the sky… Just watch out for whatever is coming back down.

Really Good Movies! The one with the fakest fake tanks

 

 

Title: The Battle of the Bulge

What Year?: 1965

Classification: Prototype/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: Underrated (1/3)

 

As I write this, I have just finished a week off, which gave me time to think over things I want to do, new and old. As usual, that led to two colliding trains of thought. On one hand, I have once again been thinking of dusting off this particularly infrequent feature, dedicated to actual good movies. On the other, I have been doing a whole lot of research on World War 2. That led me to consider a few movies that I had grown up with, and that finally brought me to the one I saw trashed the most. Of course, that was enough to convince me it was worth a review, so I present The Battle of the Bulge, a war movie that really tried.

Our story begins after a very dramatic tank-themed credits roll with an introduction to the actual Nazis preparing for their last great offensive, against the American forces gathered at the borders of Belgium and France. (Too bad about Operation Bagration…) The dastardly Krauts have a two-fold plan. One is to send English-speaking troops in American uniforms to engage in sabotage and general mayhem behind Allied lines. The other is to crush the forces of democracy with their new King Tiger tanks, commanded by a morally complex Teutonic officer. (Guess which one actually worked…) We then meet a grizzled tanker, a young officer, a charming local damsel and an assortment of other colorful characters who must roll with the tide as German might throws the allies into disorder and retreat. But the looming final battle will be for a prominent oil depot, and the ubermenschen must triumph or run out of gas!

The Battle of the Bulge was a 1965 war drama by Warner Bros, based on the Ardennes Countoffensive of December 1944 and the related Operation Greif. The film was regarded as an answer to 1962 Fox film The Longest Day. Robert Shaw was cast as the German commander Col. Hessler, following his appearance as Grant in From Russia With Love. His character was considered a fictionalized version of accused war criminal Joachim Piper, the only role to closely correspond to an identifiable historical person. Others in the ensemble cast included Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson and Telly Savalas (see… Horror Express? And the Gobots movie???) as the tanker Guffy. The film was criticized at the time of release for historical inaccuracies by a number of participants in the battle, including Dwight Eisenhower. It later attracted controversy for its use of post-war armored vehicles, including American Pattons identified onscreen as German Tiger 2 tanks, and filming at locations in Spain that did not resemble the terrain or conditions of the battle. It was a possible commercial failure, earning a North American box office of $4.5 million against a $6.5M budget. It would benefit from frequent airings on television. As of April 2023, it is available for free streaming on Youtube.

For my experiences, this might well be the first major World War 2 movie I ever saw thanks to 1990s TV. Long after, still long ago, I had my rematch and definitely found it poorly aged. What really stood out in the research and ponderings that led to this review is how far it already was from the war. In the culminating irony, it’s still earlier than the biggest and possibly last “modern” wave of war films in the 1970s (see Cross Of Iron), which I now know accounts for most of the ones that I can remember encountering in the wild back when. That finally brought me very cautiously back to this one. I am now prepared to say, it held up a lot better than it is given credit for.

Moving forward, the obvious things to get out of the way are almost all things that were almost entirely beyond anyone’s control. In particular, there was simply no way to portray tanks in the numbers this film required without using the real thing. There was even less that could be done to film significant numbers of functioning armored vehicles effectively and safely, except under conditions far more ideal than those of a “real” battlefield. I must further emphasize that the vast majority of the movie’s scenes at least show snow and forests rather than the sunny plains (in Spain???) that everyone complains about. I will further admit, the wonky tanks definitely threw me off more than anything else the last time I came back to this one. Even then, what really bothered me was that I had no trouble envisioning solutions to a number of problems. The actual King Tiger in particular was already advanced enough that any number of later tanks could have substituted tolerably for it with no modification beyond a big enough mockup of the turret. Hell, if they had just called them Panzer IVs, a mockup of the gnarly late-war versions would already have so much extra plating we wouldn’t even see the wheels and suspension that give the most trouble.

That leaves the characters and story, which admittedly don’t hold up as well as they could have. The usual problem with ensemble casts is that the time for real character development has to be divided between them, and this suffers a little more than usual. In certain lights, Shaw’s character does as much harm as good. On the balance, he does at least deliver on his outsized screen time, actually pulling off the cold-blooded, hyper-analytical Prussian military man. The only thing really debatable is the effort to show his disapproval of the conduct of his men, which is uniquely framed in the same functional terms as his tactics. On the Allied side, we do get a relatable and genuinely entertaining everyman in Savalas, who might just as well have been elevated to the lead. The rest of the cast is either too undeveloped or cliches (both in the case of the doomed love interest). What again sets this apart is that the story actually works in many of the issues that truly decided the battle and the war. The chronic oil shortages of Nazi Germany are a recurring plot point that takes a brutal twist in the finale, while the vastly exaggerated effectiveness of the Greif masquerade indirectly highlights the extent to which it was founded in pulp adventures over sound tactics. (It’s worth further note that participants who survived to be brought to trial emphatically denied that they had fired on Allied troops while posing as same.) An extra highlight that came close to “one scene” status is the discovery by the baffled Nazis of a fresh chocolate cake, with all that it implies about the logistics that the US brought to bear.

Now for the “one scene”, I’m going with one that I realized I remembered from way back when, which I probably wouldn’t have placed in this movie without actually seeing it. Toward the end, Shaw/ Hessler is talking to his subordinate Conrad, portrayed by Christian Blech, who was not only German but an actual Wehrmacht veteran. When his commander reports that they have advanced further than any other unit, the subordinate exclaims, “We have won the war!” That draws a monologue from Hessler, who admits that conventional victory was already beyond the Nazis’ reach in 1941. Instead, he maintains that their war will simply go on indefinitely. When Conrad asks what will become of their families, the commandant says chillingly, “They will become German soldiers, and you will be proud of them.” It’s as warped a view of reality as Conrad’s laughable optimism, yet it captures both the outlook of the Nazis by the end of the war and the eventual realities of the Cold War. Given the fate of his real-life counterpart, it’s all the more unsettling to consider Shaw’s quite casual remark in the midst of this: “The world is not going to get rid of us after all…”

In closing, what I come to is an idea I initially developed earlier in this review, on what I consider the fundamental tiers of war films. The truly and fully “Historical” films are the ones that are or claim to be effectively documentaries or biographies, like The Longest Day, based entirely on “real” events and the experiences of those involved. At the other end are what I count as Allegories, especially in the “anti-war” subgenre, which openly use the events and setting as the backdrop for a broader message. (Separate rant, the latter category is where Enemy At The Gates should have been placed all along.) The actual “average” is the War Drama, a fictional narrative set within the historical setting. These films don’t have to be as meticulous as the first or as thematically ambitious as the second, just functional enough not to be at odds with reality beyond what narrative conventions and available technology already impose. In those terms, the present film is no more a “failure” than Saving Private Ryan. By my usual refrain, it did its duty. After all this time, that’s enough to earn my respect.

Fiction: The Space Guys Adventure, Part 19!

 I wanted to get in a post in the actual weekend, and I actually had two options for the Space Guys. One had stuff happening, the other was a backstory dump that does develop a few characters who are supposed to be important. Guess which one this is. As usual, a table of contents is at the end...

The trek to Uranus went on. Training with the equipment improved morale. There were further unexpected effects. Jax and Dr. Cahill began appearing together again, and acted more like real friends than lovers. Vasily emerged after a long self-imposed exile, often in the company of Sandra. Jackie simply stayed on his own, talking freely with men and women alike. A very few times, he kept company with Anastasia in her husband’s absence. That subsided, however, after the third time Jason saw Moxon watching her.

He also spent more time with the higher officers. Alek conversed regularly with or leastways at Mehmet, who was often with Tanya. Jason considered whether the two were having an affair, but his suspicions faded after the one time he did see Mehmet leave her quarters, following a half-heard argument that clearly ended in him being thrown out. He also grew more acquainted with the Americans Smith and Yates, officially their Ethnic Relations and Morale officers, evidently good friends. A time came when Jason, Alek and Jax joined them at the captain’s table. Smith brought out a map of the United States, divided into 54 states and 7 Trade And Commerce Authority zones. Jason pondered the largest of them, which ran from Louisiana to Montana. Its center of operations was Baton Rouge.

“So, here’s my home town, Philadelphia, PA,” Smith said. He pointed to a spot in the Upper Atlantic Trade Zone. He tapped another spot in a corridor that tapered down to a swath of coast east of Louisiana, in the east of a blocky state in the middle. “And this is where my counterpart is from, Franklin, Tennessee. We both represent the United States Office of Ethnic Relations. Our mission since the War has been to identify and integrate non-Anglo citizens.”

By then, Donald and Anastasia had wandered in. “Yeah,” Donald said. “In case you think that sounds nice, they started as a wing of the Draft Board. It was all because there were people trying to get in to the all-moreno units.”

Jason nodded, disregarding Donald as usual. “So, what, were your folks on opposite sides of the Civil War?”

“Uh-uh,” Yates said. “I came from east Tennessee, where there isn’t enough flat land for the plantations. People say we were never really in the South, but we’re further south than Virginia. It was one of the places the Rebs couldn’t control. One of my ancestors fought on the Union side. My own family organized for Integration. I went door to door taking donations.”

The captain spoke up then. “It is like Thuringia,” he said, either wistful or sad. “We are at the meeting of West, East and South, of every part and no part. We were not many or powerful, yet even the Reich knew better than to tell us our business.”

After a moment of silence, he regathered himself. “I am given to understand that there have been discussions among the crew about the history of the Americas,” he said. “Officers Smith and Yates have provided a list of films that might better address any questions. We were interested in getting a Martian’s opinion.”

Jason looked at Jax. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

A monitor was set up. The first few videos were a propaganda reels featuring either Tweel the Martian a costumed character named Captain Patriot. Jason had seen others, but these were the first that was in color. The reels with Captain were always idealistic, always ending with the vindication of non-Anglo war heroes and gallant workers misunderstood by society. Those with Tweel were sadder and more mature, as the ostrich creature talked openly about prejudice, persecution, enslavement and worse, grimly illustrated from history. Then they got to a reel with the Captain that was different. This time, it was a young veteran and his bride and groom arrested at the altar by a doddering yet devious Race Registrar. He presented an affidavit that one of her great-grandfathers’ great-grandfathers, supposedly unknown, had in fact been an enslaved African. On those grounds, he held that they not only could not marry, but had committed a knowing felony by listing her race as “white”.

The ensuing drama was longer and more elaborate than usual. The couple admitted that they knew of rumors of that a distant ancestor of the bride had had an affair with a freed Creole, but insisted that while none denied it might be true, he had died years before the birth of her only son. However, the record of the Creole’s death could not be found. The Captain went in search of a duplicate in Federal records, suspecting an intrigue by the bride’s distant family. Meanwhile, two friendly morenos debated a movement to repeal laws against intermarriage, which they emphasized was led by Anglos who had been denied marriages to each other over minute or entirely speculated degrees of mixed ancestry. Of course, the Captain captured a lackey sent to destroy the records that proved the bride’s story. He arrived in the court room with proof that the Registrar was part of a plot against her, and a Reich sympathizer to boot. The judge prepared to marry the couple as the villain was led away, until the Captain gave his own objection. He called on the young man’s father, who confessed that he had hidden proof that his own grandfather was moreno.

“It’s a good propo,” Donald mused. “It couldn’t have happened that way, of course. All the penalties were down to fines and misdemeanors by the end of the War. And they couldn’t mess with church marriages. And  if Anglos just put their race as colored, the States had to go along with it or wait 18 months for a review by the Draft admin. By then, people were putting anything they wanted, just to scraw with the Registrars.”

“It wasn’t that simple,” Jax said. “The States hadn’t all repealed felony penalties, they just couldn’t enforce them while the Draft was active. All the Fed cared about was giving the Selective Service branch time to create a standard for their own Registry. They actually stopped suits that could have overturned the laws. It hurt a lot of people.”

Yates showed them another reel, evidently for the Office’s own staff. It led into a case of an Anglo caught trying to hide the body of an Anglita child in a field on commune land.  “Jill helped her mother with a book on the trial,” Jax said. “The girl was really half-Mexican. They had been looking for the guy a while. The Fed was close to getting involved. He probably thought leaving a body on commune land would convince them they were looking for a moreno.”

The trial followed. With utmost delicacy and fairness, the petitioner for the commune presented the case to moreno jury and an Anglo judge, in a court in Baton Rouge.The man was found guilty of abduction leading to death. The jury foreman earnestly requested that he be committed as unsound in mind. The judge instead sentenced him to hang. “He didn’t have the authority to do that,” Jax said. “It would have gone to Federal review, anyway.

“Authority, Hell,” Donald said. “I read someone had to tell him the State had outlawed hanging 20 years earlier.”

“It was all a misunderstanding. Really,” Yates said. “The Office sent a statement explaining the facts to every news paper in the country. There were editors who printed it that still had the headline that blacks had sent a white man to his death.”

“They said what they wanted to believe,” Jax said. The reel already showed what followed. It froze on a shot from above of flames that seemed to stretch without limit from east to west.

“And that was it?” Jason said, baffled. “That was what they needed an Intervention for?”

“Sometimes, the forest just wants to burn,” Donald said.

Jason started at Moxon’s words, which he had never admitted overhearing. Fortunately, Jax spoke first. “Wait,” he said. “Where did you hear that?”

“I don’t know,” the engineer said. “I guess it’s supposed to be an Indian saying, or something.”

Jason saw one record left, with the markings of restricted material. Yates reluctantly agreed to play it. “It was a propaganda film from a faction called the Nordicist Party,” he said. “We placed their materials on a Restricted list just before the Intervention.”

“I want to see it,” Jason said. At a nod from the captain, Yates put on the disc.

It was an animated film, little more than still images that showed in sequence as the dialogue and narration played. Its vignettes were on a Biblical vein that meant little to Jason, with the evident intent of an allegory for the sophisticated. Even he recognized it from the start as an escalating chain of heretical deviations. It started with the Creator making men from baked mud, each colored according to the clay from which they came. Some were a deep, burnt brown. Some were glazed white. Some were brick red. Then the creator tried to mix another race from remnants of half-baked clay. The result was small and malformed dwarfs of ugly yellow that crumbled in the Maker’s hands. It was decreed that the men should be scattered on the Earth so that they would not mingle.

Then came the central story, of a chief named Adam who called himself made by God’s own hands. He had two wives, one brown and one snow white with golden hair. The first was named Eve, the other Lilith. Some said that the latter was not a woman, but a goddess, angel or demon who had defied heaven to consort with a mortal man. It happened that Eve had born two sons, Abel and Seth, one brown and the other tan like olive, where Lilith bore a son and a daughter, Cain and Aclima, each as white as herself. Cain guarded his sister from any man, some said out of love, others out of a lust that Adam declared could not be fulfilled. A time came when Adam declared that Aclima should be given to Abel. When Cain tried to hide her, Abel abducted her. Cain struck down Abel in vengeance, only to find his sister already with child. Fearing a war between his sons, Adam called on Heaven to send a curse, that all should know by Cain’s white skin that he was mighty and terrible as Death, and so flee him or serve at his feet. Cain called down his own curse, that his sons would ever after do as they willed with the daughters of Abel, but any son of Abel who but touched a daughter of Cain would be made a eunuch in their house.

Finally, there was a tale of Babel, founded by the descendants of Seth in the land south of Eden. Their king Nimrod was nearly white. He decreed that he would make his Tower, a great ziggurat to ascend to Heaven and meet the gods or God that made Heaven and Earth. To secure workers for his great monument, he married a dark queen from beyond the western sea. But the slaves and servants she brought with him could not or would not learn the speech of his overseers, nor would they obey the clearest direction. Soon, they ran riot, looting the city and seizing women who would not be willing consorts with them. When the queen bore a son of pure black skin, the king knew he himself was made a cuckold. He took her to the platform atop the Tower and hurled her down with his own hands. But the bricks were already weathered and crumbling, and the earth beneath was sand. As the queen tumbled down, she  called a curse that split the ground. The ziggurat collapsed, crushing the king and queen and their followers together.

“What the Hell?” Jason said at the end. “I mean, really, what the Hell? Who believed this? Did anyone believe any of it?”

That was when Anastasia spoke up. “You can tell them what they teach us,” she said.

“That’s… different,” Jason said with a frown.

Alek looked at him, her expression halfway between empathy and amusement. “You never talk about religion, even to me,” she said. “What do they teach the farmboys?”

“Well, it’s only for the families that don’t have their own church,” Jason said. “People like Jax’s folks and Jill’s know about it, but we don’t preach at each other. So, anyway, they teach us prayers to the old gods, like Mars and Venus and Jupiter. It’s not to worship them or say we believe in them, but to honor what they stood for and everything they gave us.”

He crossed his arms with a scowl. There was a silence. It broke when Alek started laughing. “Sorry, sorry, it is not how it looks,” she said. “It is just, when we are alone, he calls me Venus. Sometime, he has me call him Vulcan!” She covered her mouth as she continued to giggle. Jason managed a smile. The captain himself did the same, quite kindly.

Jason finally looked to the captain. “You came from Deutschland,” he said. “What do they really say about what happened there?”

“I don’t suppose we could understand,” he said. “One thing you must understand, we do not speak the names of the Leaders or of their deeds, if we can avoid it. Why should we, when even the historian cannot say who gave the last commands? In Thuringia, we look at them differently than others. Even now, there are men and women who will say what it was like to see them come. It was from the south that they came, Austrians, Catholics, alehouse trash, faugh!”

He looked down at the map, a frown on his face. “We did not understand them, we could not,” he said. “The elders say they laughed at them. Why not? They said that Germany had forgotten how to be German. Perhaps it was true, in Munich or Berlin, but not in Erfurt! And who were they, to tell us or anyone else how to be German again? It is a proverb now, if it was not then, a Bavarian is to a Thuringian what a frog is to a fish!” He thumped his chest. “We were the living heart of Deutschland. Our ways were as they had always been. We were happy, we were free, we minded our business and let others mind their own!”

He shook his head. “But the old ones will confess that they knew even then, the men of the Reich were evil, and if they were not consumed by their own evil, it would be by a greater evil they drew on themselves and many more. We thought that if we minded our business as we always had, we need only wait for their end. But that came from the south, too. The old men say the hills shook long before they could be seen or heard, a thousand tanks and a million men who had seen and suffered the worst the Reich could do.”

Again, it was Anastasia who spoke. “Our leaders were against it, even the ones we do not talk about,” she said. “The commanders said we could still break out of Poland. The Englishman only said that Munich was to the Reich what Leningrad was to the Party.”

She turned to Jason. “What do you think, Farmboy?” she said. “Do you want more history? Here it is. People are terrible. They always have been, they probably always will be. Just be glad we’re out here.”

She turned to leave. As Donald rose to follow, he turned back to Jason. “I’m just glad,” he said, “I already married a Russian.”

That made Anastasia freeze in her tracks. “Russian?” she said. It was a hiss like a snake. “We have been married almost a year, and you think I am Russian?” She ran out, and Jason and Jax ran after her.

 

By the time they got to her cabin, she had already locked Donald out.

Table of contents

Part 1. The demo!

Part 2. The villain!

Part 3. The world-building!

Part 4. The romance!

Part 5. The killer robot!

Part 6: The shuttle ride!

Part 7: Alternate universe pop culture!

Part 8: The launch!

Part 9: The girl talk!

Part 10: The domestic disturbance!!!

Part 11: The Space Nazis!!!

Part 12: The inevitable geography lesson!

Part 13: The wedding!!!

Part 14:  The spicy chapter!

Part 15: The bad guy backstory!

Part 16: The Dinner!

Part 17: The alternate history!

Part 18: The weapons exposition!

Fiction: The Space Guys Adventure, Part 11!

 It's my last day for a weekend post, and once again all I have is another Space Guys post, this time pretty much odds and ends. And yes, spoiler, I'm recycling the Space Nazis scenario from my Exotroopers (anti) series. As usual, the table of contents is at the end.

As the Janus left the asteroid belt behind, Jason finally proposed to Alek. The crew was gathered in the captain’s cabin in hopes of a glimpse of Jupiter. To that end, Donald set up a telescope in line with the porthole beyond the captain’s cabin. It was not a stable view, thanks to the rotation of the ring, but they could see the giant planet when the wing-like extensions of the Mission Fuselage were not in the way. The captain took the first look through the telescope, as the ring reached the bottom of its rotation, and gave his rumbling laugh of approval. As the others gathered to look through the telescope, Jason knelt and fumbled through his overprepared speech. Alek let him get halfway through before she cut in. “You want to marry me, no?” she said.

“Of course,” Jason answered.

“Why?” she said.

“Be… because I love you,” he said. “I… I want to make you happy.”

“Yes,” she said, shifting to her flat lecture voice. “But why do you want to marry me? What is in it for you?”

“Well, you… you make me happy.”

She made a point of pondering. “Good enough,” she said. “I accept.”

“Speaking of,” Donald chimed in. He abruptly kissed Anastasia. “The captain married us last night!” Alek looked incredulously at Anastasia. She blushed but held her head up, ignoring critical stares from Vasily and Jackie and a bemused gaze from Moxon.

 

In the company of their friends, Jason had learned that his best defense was to show that he was far from uneducated, joining in discussions of everything from astronomy to engineering to languages. Moxon in particular regularly quizzed him on geography, and rarely caught him in an error. Jason, for his part, was most interested in a subject called mathematical linguistics, apparently developed by Tanya and Mehmet, who could be found together often enough that there was speculation if they were involved. For their part, the odd pair listened respectfully when he told them one of the “story” problems from his education, this one set in the lands of Arabia, called the Scroll of Solomon.

“So, there was a Sultan called Saladin,” Jason said by way of introduction. “He was a powerful king and a great warrior, but what he valued most was wisdom. So he collected books from every land and in every language, and he paid hundreds of scribes to translate them in his own tongue. Then one day, someone brought him a scroll that wasn’t like any other. It was very, very old, with words written in gold and beautiful pictures. The scholar who brought it said that it had belonged to King Solomon, and he got it from a holy man who said that it was a gift from an angel. The problem was, nobody could read the letters, or find any script like them. So Saladin had his scribes give every letter a number, based on how often they found it in the scroll. Then they rewrote it as numbers, and what they found was one long, beautiful equation.”

Mehmet had considered for a few moments. “Interesting,” he said. “I’m sure it is based on a real text. A smuggler brought it out of Italy, as I recall, only about a hundred years ago. At any rate, the story was clearly created by someone who understood the basic principles of statistical linguistics. It would not work, of course, but for an illustration, it is sound.”

“So how does it work?” Jason asked. “Do you just treat languages like a code to crack?”

“No,” Mehmet continued smoothly. “Cryptography is about communication with a function that would be obvious if it were unencrypted. What we learn from it is that language and mathematics are not fundamentally different. All information has a mathematical component. By extension, no language can be so different from any other that certain things cannot be learned by statistical analyses. If an archeologist 6,000 years from now had no knowledge of English, they could still figure out that `e’ and `a’ were the most common letters and `an’ and `the’ were among the most common words.”

“What if someone tried to fool you?” Jason continued. “Suppose they just made up a bunch of symbols and chose which one to put together with a spinning wheel. From there, they could put together words and put them on the same wheel, only a few words could be repeated. How would you know there wasn’t something there?”

“It has been tried,” Mehmet said. “In the occult fields, it is fairly common. What we have learned is that the human mind is not equipped to understand randomness. We can look at momentary patterns of water vapor or the positions of stars thousands of kilometers away, and think we see shapes and order. But thousands of us could walk past a series of pits in the rock for decades before one figured out that they once held the support beams of a temple. In practice, we are even worse at producing the random than we are at recognizing it. Without a fully automated system, our conscious and unconscious minds will always contaminate the results?”

Jason glanced in Jax’s direction. “Suppose we found something out there?” he said. “Something that wasn’t built by any human?”

For just a moment, Mehmet and Tanya gave each other a glance that made him wonder if they knew something he didn’t. But the former merely shrugged. “We will only know if and when we see it,” he said. “Even so, I would wager that we could figure out their math.”

 

Jason also spent time learning about their destination. Almost all of it came from a single image, taken from a distance of over 4 billion kilometers. The established authority was Professor Futura. When he first presented the image, Jason immediately pointed to a bright white spot on the blue-gray orb. “What’s that?” he said.

Futura had smiled. “That is the main reason we are out here,” he said. “It has been called simply the Anomaly, which is really a routine practice. What we know is that it originated as a meteor impact crater. In those terms, it is large but not exceptional, perhaps half the size of Hellas Basin, though much larger in proportion to the planetary body. What is unusual is that the interior is a completely different climate system from the paramoon as a whole. It is much warmer, enough that the initial survey classified it as volcanic in origin. It also has a greatly different atmosphere. Spectroscopic data show gaseous nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide, in quantities comparable to Gaian atmosphere. Most remarkably, there is a high volume of water, the source of the cloud layer. The data was inconclusive whether this is actual water vapor or suspended ice crystals, but either implies an Earth-like precipitation cycle. Unfortunately, the same cloud layer prevented direct observation of the crater interior. Our main objective is to survey the anomaly.”

“What about the paramoon?” Alek said. “The reports say it has nearly the same gravity as Gaia. How is that possible? How do you really know?”

Futura smiled again, more subtly. “We were able to infer certain things either from the paramoon or from its evident effects on the orbits of other moons,” he said. “Its gravity implies that it contains a core of very dense material. It is believed that it was captured by the gaseous planet in the relatively recent past. The real question has been how recent. Many moons and planetoids have been discovered within the Atomic Era, but every paramoon of comparable size was discovered before the Great Wars. Some have gone so far as to speculate that its capture only happened since space exploration began.”

“Then can it really be colonized?” Jason said.

“We don’t know,” Futura said. For a moment, Jason wondered if he knew something he would not tell. He did not notice that Alek had met the professor’s gaze and shaken her head.

 

Regular communications continued to and from Gaia and Mars. Every week, each crew member was allowed to record and receive at least one personal communication, and given the choice whether to listen in private. Jason and Alek were with Jax when he played a message from his wife. The morena kept a level tone and a calm expression as she explained that she was expecting their first child, and that it would be a son. Jason turned to his friend sternly as the message ended. “We knew,” Jax said. “It wouldn’t have mattered. You know how it is. Most of the time, that doesn’t work out anyway. This was once in a lifetime.”

Alek true closer, looking very sad. “I have seen figures,” she said. “The miscarriage rate is very high. Do you think… he will make it?”

Jason shrugged. “Usually, if something goes wrong, it would have by now,” he said. “It’s the same on the Motherworld, really.”

“What about Dr. Cahill?” Jason said with a scowl.

“She knows,” Jax said. “It’s not like that, anyway. We talk, we take care of each other. Jill knew it might happen. I told her she could do whatever she has to.”

“Then what does Dr. Cahill say?” Alek said.

“She says she’s glad I have someone back home,” Jax said. “She’s told me about her husband, and her son. I know all about that. They had problems before she came out here, not the way people think. It doesn’t matter.” The conversation trailed off then. But the next time Dr. Cahill came to the cabin, she left quickly, with tears in her eyes.

 

Then a time came when Jason lay with Alek, her face-down beneath him, half-listening to a documentary. “For seven years, the War had raged in the lands between the great oceans,” a narrator intoned. “But the final battle would come more than a year after its end, in the one place the War had never touched. It is the shores of Pantagonia, and young Professor Futura is leading the charge against the last stronghold of the leader of the Final Reich, Heinz Himmelman.”

Jason looked up in interest. Of course, he had seen the footage before: The desolate cliffs; the scrambling commandos; the lumbering Landkreuzer; the mass of rockets and fuel tanks it supported; and atop it all, a spade-shaped craft not unlike the Pegasus payloader. The narrator explained how Heinz Himmelmann had recruited or captured the greatest minds of the world for his special projects, starting with an electronic brain that proved that the Reich could not win the war. How he had diverted thousands of prisoners and laborers, billions of marks and countless tons of material for the greatest project of all. “His workers labored night and day, some in fear, some in devotion, some in the hope of some greater good,” the narrator continued. Jason felt Alek stir beneath him. “The sum of their efforts was the Tottenkarte, the first spacecraft capable of reaching into interplanetary space.”

The screen showed the craft rising into the sky. “It launched into the heavens, carrying Himmelmann and the greatest minds of the Reich. No other craft could pursue it, nor rise high enough to intercept it. The armies of the world could only watch as it rose to the edge of space… and vanished.”

“My grandfather worked on that ship,” Alek said. “Great grandfather, actually. We all just call him Grandfather. A lot of people think he was on it. But probably no. They only ever said that because nobody never found him. I spent a long time trying to find out what I could. I talked to people who would not have talked if they knew. They all said they did not know. I could tell it was true.”

“What do you think happened?” Jason asked.

Alek shook her head at that. “It is not like people think,” she said. “They never really had a chance. There was too much they did not know, too much they could not do. The only question should have been where they came down. But they never did. We should have seen it, we would have. People were watching, everywhere. Nobody saw nothing, never.”

She settled on her back, staring upward. “I feel like I know him, better than my own mother and father,” she said. “I understand him. I understand what it was like to be him. I am the only one left like him. You know, with the supergenius. There were a few others in our family who had it. But it skips around, like red hair. An uncle here, a cousin there, maybe one of my aunts. My mother and her father, not even a little. That is why I am here at all. The rest… all gone.”

She turned her head to meet Jason’s gaze. “I might be the last one, even if we have children,” she said. “I can’t, you know, until we get back. To come at all, I had to let a doctor do something, something only another doctor could undo. We all did. If we get back, you will still be a farmboy. I know, you are very smart; you will still never be like me. But it is okay. I like you the way you are. If it has to be a farmboy’s son with you or a girl like me with someone else, I would call it a fair trade.”

 

She put her arms around him. “There are things you do not know,” she said. “Do not worry, you will. Some, you may not like. I still like you.” She rolled down a partition. “Now show me again, what it is the farm girls do…”

Table of Contents

Part 1. The demo!

Part 2. The villain!

Part 3. The world-building!

Part 4. The romance!

Part 5. The killer robot!

Part 6: The shuttle ride!

Part 7: Alternate universe pop culture!

Part 8: The launch!

Part 9: The girl talk!

Part 10: The domestic disturbance!!!