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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.