Upsetting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  Males in the body paint of landcruiser and fighting vehicle crews crowded round Ussmak and his companions. “Welcome to Siberia,” one of them called. “This place is so bad, they say even Big Uglies got exiled here.”

  “The ground is frozen half the year,” another male added.

  “The atmosphere doesn’t freeze—it just seems that way,” said a third.

  Ussmak had never run into such a cynical band of males. They had to be ginger tasters, he decided, and felt better for a moment.

  Nejas waved his hands, trying to get a word in edgewise. “Where is this railroad we’re supposed to be interdicting? How can we even move about in this hideous weather, let alone fight?”

  “The railroad’s south of here, but not far enough to do us any good,” their guide answered. “We’ve broken it; the trick is to keep the Russkis from hauling anything across the break and shipping it one way or the other. They have all sorts of animals, and sometimes they even use motor transport. When we come on one of their convoys, it’s usually a massacre.”

  “Coming on them is the problem, though,” another male said. “Even radar has trouble seeing through these storms—when it’s not frozen up, that is.”

  Yet another male said, “And we don’t even have it too bad—when we’re out there, we’re in our vehicles. It’s the poor infantrymales I really pity. They have to head out without a nice, warm eggshell around them.”

  “Infantrymales!” Skoob exclaimed. “How could you possibly go out there and fight on foot in—that? And even if you could, why would you?”

  “Because the Russkis can,” said the male who’d guided them. “If we didn’t have infantry patrols out there, the cursed Big Uglies would sneak within mortar range and start dropping their stinking bombs right down on top of our heads. Either that or they’d get into our vehicle parks and work the Emperor knows how much havoc there. They’ve done both, and they probably will again.”

  Ginger or no ginger, Ussmak wanted to hide. “I thought nothing could be worse than Britain and all that poison gas. Maybe I was wrong.”

  In a ragged chorus, the guide and the other males in the barracks sang out: “Welcome to Siberia!”

  Rance Auerbach looked to the cloudy skies, hoping for snow. Thus far, his prayers had gone unanswered. Low, dirty-gray clouds hung over the prairie of eastern Colorado, but whatever snow or even rain—he would gladly have taken rain—they held refused to fall.

  He waved to the troopers of his company, urging them to spread out farther. If a Lizard helicopter spotted them, they were on the way to becoming raw meat. The winter before, from all he’d heard, the Lizards hadn’t got so frisky so late in the year. This time, they’d sent a force west by helicopter to occupy Cheyenne Wells, and were pushing infantry west along US 40 to try to consolidate their position. If they did, that would put Lamar, due south of Cheyenne Wells down US 385, in a hell of a bind.

  Worse still, the next town west of Cheyenne Wells on US 40 was called First View: it was the place where the Rockies first poked up over the horizon of the Great Plains. In the Rockies lay Denver. Because he’d traveled with Leslie Groves, Auerbach got the idea something important was going on in Denver, even if he didn’t know—and had no business knowing—what. Lizard thrusts that headed toward Denver needed stopping, no matter what.

  The prairie seemed utterly empty but for his men and their horses. Turn those into buffalo and you’d have things back the way they were before the white man came—before the red man, too, come to that.

  He turned in his saddle and called to Bill Magruder. “Now I know what the Indians must have felt like, going up against the U.S. Cavalry back in my grandpa’s day.”

  His second-in-command nodded. “Sitting Bull licked General Custer, but look at all the good it did him in the end. We can’t just win fights now and again. We have to win the whole shootin’ match.”

  Auerbach nodded. He’d been trained to think in terms of campaigns, which Sitting Bull certainly hadn’t. He wondered what sort of global strategy the Lizards were trying to maintain. They’d plainly had one at the start of their invasion, but it seemed to have broken down in the face of unexpected human resistance.

  As soon as his company passed Sheridan Lake, Auerbach waved them off US 385. No tracked vehicle could match a horse for cross-country performance. So he told himself, anyhow, although the rule applied more in mountains and marshes than on the rolling plains near the Kansas border. But his troopers and their mounts would be harder to spot in the mix of stubble and unharvested crops than on the asphalt of the highway.

  “Sir, will you want to strike US 40 east or west of Arapahoe?” Magruder asked.

  Auerbach’s orders gave him discretion. Arapahoe lay about ten miles east of Cheyenne Wells, close to the Kansas line. If he came to the highway west of the little town, he risked drawing notice from the Lizards who’d been helicoptered into Cheyenne Wells. If he reached the highway on the Kansas side of Arapahoe, though, he was closer to what had been the Lizards’ main forward bases.

  “We’ll go in to the east of Arapahoe,” he decided after a few seconds’ thought. “The farther east we can damage them, the more we draw their attention away from moving west, which is what we want to try to do.” That operating as far east as possible made it easier for the Lizards to damage him was something he tried not to think about.

  He and his men camped for the night on an abandoned farm not far south of US 40. When they set out the next morning, they left their horses behind, toting on their backs the supplies they needed, as if they were infantrymen.

  Auerbach had scouts out. He and most of his men sprawled in tall, yellow grass while the scouts advanced to make sure no Lizard patrols were on the highway. He watched through field glasses as the scouts crept forward, their khaki uniforms almost invisible against the brown earth and dying plants.

  Only when they waved did he go forward with the demolition team. Two men laid charges on the surface of the road, connecting each one with the electrical detonator. They ran wire back to a little gully a couple of hundred feet away and then, crouching in it, blew the charges.

  The earth shook under Auerbach. Chunks of asphalt rained down on the improvised trench. Somebody swore: “Goddamn thing hit me right in the ass, Howard. Whose side you on, anyway?”

  Howard was the trooper who’d pushed down the detonator plunger. He said, “I’m on the good guys’ side. Reckon that leaves you out, Maxwell.”

  “Let’s see what we’ve done.” Auerbach got up and trotted over to US 40. He nodded in solemn approval. Through swirling dust, he saw they’d blown a crater across both lanes of blacktop. Anybody who sent a tracked vehicle down into it would get his teeth rattled. Nobody would try to send a wheeled vehicle into it—you’d have to go around.

  The demolition team finished their job in the area, then became ordinary cavalrymen-turned-foot soldiers like the rest of the company. Auerbach positioned his men on the north side of US 40, although that put the highway between them and their horses. The ground rose toward the low ridge of the Smoky Hills there, and offered better firing positions.

  Once the men had dug in, there was nothing to do but wait. He gnawed jerked beef and fidgeted. He hadn’t wanted to blow the road too close to Cheyenne Wells, not least for fear the Lizards there would respond before all his preparations were ready. Now he began to worry that they hadn’t noticed the explosion at all.

  Bill Magruder let out a hiss, then said, “Sir, something coming down the road from the east.”

  Auerbach peered in that direction. “Something” was a motor vehicle—no, a couple of motor vehicles. That meant they were Lizards, all right. He raised the field glasses to his eyes. The vehicles leaped closer: a couple of armored personnel carriers. He grimaced. He’d hoped for one of those and a truck. Well, you didn’t always get everything you hoped for.

  The carriers—he would have thought of them as half-tracks, but the Lizards fully tracked their machines—slowed when they saw the c
rater ahead. Auerbach kept a wary eye on their turrets. They mounted light cannon, not machine guns like American half-tracks.

  A Lizard crawled out of a hatch and went up to the edge of the broken asphalt. No one fired at him. He got back into the machine. Auerbach waited to see what would happen next. If the Lizards decided to wait and send for a road repair crew, a mighty good plan would have gone up in smoke.

  After a moment, several Lizards emerged from the lead armored personnel carrier. A couple of them scrambled up onto the deck behind the turret and unshipped a dozer blade, which the others helped them fit to the front of the personnel carrier’s hull. They were going to do a hasty job of road repair themselves. The waiting cavalrymen did not interfere.

  The Lizards got back into the carrier. It rolled off onto the soft shoulder of the road. The dozer blade dug in to pick up dirt to fill in the hole in the road. The engine’s note, though quiet to anyone used to American armor, got louder.

  Hunkered down behind a tumbleweed, Auerbach bit his lip and waited, fingers crossed. When the explosion came, it wasn’t as loud as the one that had blasted the crater in US 40, but far more satisfying. Antitank mines carried a charge big enough to wreck a Sherman. That didn’t always suffice to take out the tougher Lizard tanks, but it was plenty to ruin an armored personnel carrier. Smoke and flame spurted up from the vehicle, which slewed sideways and stopped, the right track blown off the road wheels.

  Hatches flew open. Like popcorn jumping up in a popper, Lizards started bailing out of the stricken machine. Now Auerbach’s cavalry company opened up with almost everything they had. The Lizard infantry men fell, one after another, although a couple made it to the ground unhurt and started shooting back.

  The turret of the unhurt Lizard personnel carrier swung north with frightening speed. Both the cannon and machine gun coaxial with it opened up on the machine-gun position the Americans had dug for themselves. No, the Lizards weren’t fools, Auerbach thought as he fired at one of the males who’d succeeded in escaping from his vehicle: they went after the most dangerous enemy weapon first.

  Or rather, they went after what they thought was the most dangerous enemy weapon. Auerbach had posted a two-man bazooka crew as close to the road as he dared: about seventy-five yards away. Like antitank mines, bazookas were iffy against Lizard tanks; frontal armor defeated the rockets with ease, while even side or rear hits weren’t guaranteed kills. But the ugly little rocket bombs were more than enough to crack open lesser vehicles.

  An American half-track would have become an instant fireball after a bazooka hit The hydrogen fuel the Lizards used was less explosive than gasoline, and they had better firefighting gear than the handheld extinguishers American half-tracks and tanks carried. That helped the Lizards, but not enough. After a couple of heartbeats, the Lizards the bazooka round hadn’t killed or maimed began to try to escape their burning machine.

  As with the males who’d left the first personnel carrier, most of them didn’t get away from the vehicle, but some skittered off behind bushes and returned fire. At Auerbach’s urgently shouted orders, flanking parties moved out on both wings to envelop the Lizards. They had to be wiped out quickly, or—

  Auerbach didn’t want to believe he heard the rotor blades of a helicopter chewing their way through the air, not so soon. It was coming from out of the west, from Cheyenne Wells. His mouth went dry. Killing two infantry fighting vehicles was splendid, but a bad bargain if it cost him his whole company—and himself.

  Fire rippled from the weapons pod under the belly of the flying beast. The Lizards didn’t know exactly where his men were positioned, but a rocket salvo made precision anything but mandatory. Auerbach dug his face into the musty ground as the rockets flailed the prairie. Blast picked him up, flipped him onto his back, and slammed him down, hard. Through stunned ears, he heard screams amidst the explosions.

  Nose-mounted Gatling twinkling like some malign star, the helicopter bored in to finish exterminating the humans who had presumed to challenge the might of the Lizards. Auerbach and his comrades—those still alive and unwounded—returned fire. He imagined the helicopter crew laughing in the cockpit; their machine was armored against rifle-caliber rounds.

  Perhaps because they were so close to US 40, the bazooka team had not drawn the helicopter’s notice. As it hovered not far from the burning armored personnel carrier, an antitank rocket drew a trail of flame in the air toward it.

  A bazooka was not supposed to be an antiaircraft weapon. If it hit, though, it was going to do damage. It hit. The helicopter staggered, as if it had run into an invisible wall up there in the air. Then it heeled over onto its side and crashed down on US 40. For good measure, the bazooka team put another round into its belly as it lay there. Ammunition started cooking off, tracer rounds going up like fireworks.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here!” Auerbach yelled, his voice blurry even to himself. A few Lizards were still shouting, but the Americans made short work of them. Collecting the human wounded took longer and hurt more, spiritually as well as physically. Auerbach’s driving urge was speed. He wanted to be away and under cover before the Lizards sent any more aircraft after his men.

  “Even if they nail the whole lot of us, they won’t have bought anything cheap today,” he muttered. While that was undeniably true, he still wanted to escape. Victory was a lot sweeter if you lived to enjoy it. And once he go back to Lamar, he’d have some fine stories to tell Rachel Hines . . . and Penny Summers, too.

  Returning to Dover made David Goldfarb feel he’d stepped back into an earlier time in the war. Things had been simpler then, with only the Jerries to worry about. And Hitler’s finest, after all, hadn’t managed to invade England in spite of all the Führer’s threats and promises: “Don’t worry . . . he’s coming.” But he and the Wehrmacht hadn’t come. The Lizards had.

  Basil Roundbush came into the little room in the natural sciences building at Dover College where the radarman was working. The mustachioed pilot was whistling something whose words Goldfarb didn’t recognize; whatever it was, it sounded as if it ought to be bawdy.

  Working again with Roundbush brought the months at Bruntingthorpe back to the top of Goldfarb’s mind. He looked up from his oscilloscope and said in mock disgust, “All the time I was playing at infantryman, I felt sure you’d be dead and out of my hair for good.” After a moment too long, he added, “Sir.”

  Roundbush took the chaffing in good part. With a grin that made him look like a lion that had just brought down its zebra, he said, “Dead? Something even worse than that happened: I got promoted.”

  “Yes, sir, most illustrious Flight Lieutenant Roundbush, sir!” Goldfarb cried, springing to his feet to deliver a salute so vehement it threatened to snap off his arm.

  “Oh, put a sock in it,” Roundbush said genially. “Let’s get down to work, shall we?”

  “Right,” Goldfarb said. His sportiveness covered an admiration for the flier that fell only a little short of awe. He’d been through danger enough and to spare in his stint at ground combat His own fighting skill had had little to do with coming out the other side intact, though. Bullets and shell fragments flew through the air almost at random. If you were lucky, they missed you. If you weren’t you ended up dead or crippled.

  But Basil Roundbush had survived flying mission after mission against the Lizards while in an aircraft and with weapons far inferior to theirs. Luck undoubtedly had something to do with that. But a fighter pilot, unlike a ground-pounder, needed more than luck. You had to be good at what you did, or you wouldn’t keep doing it long.

  And Roundbush had not merely survived. The Distinguished Flying Cross he wore on the front of his tunic testified to that. He wasn’t commonly given to boasting—most often when chatting up a barmaid—but Goldfarb had heath he’d brought down one of the Lizards’ immense transport aircraft, the ones that, when roaring overhead, looked as if they could carry a regiment. They made the Dakotas the RAF had started getting from the American
s not long before the Lizards came seem like children’s models of wood and paper by comparison—and the Dakotas had far outclassed anything the British had before them.

  That kill had earned Roundbush his DFC. What he’d said about it was to the point: “Pack of ruddy fools back in London. The lasses must hate them, one and all—they think size is more important than technique. Even if it was the size of a whale, the transport couldn’t shoot back. Their fighter planes are another piece of business altogether.”

  Goldfarb looked out at the rain splashing down from a leaden sky and said, “If the Lizards had been smart, they would have come now. We’d have been all but blind to them in the air, what with the autumn clouds and mist and rain, but their radars are good enough to let them carry on as if this were high summer.”

  “They don’t fancy cold weather,” Roundbush said, “and I’ve heard it said they invaded us to get some of their own back after the Reds lit off that explosive-metal bomb under their scaly snouts.” He snorted. “Letting the politicians set strategy for their own reasons will make you sorry, no matter whether you’re a human being or a Lizard.”

  “Now that we’ve won, I’m glad they did it.” Goldfarb waved to the electronic apparatus filling the shelves and tables of the room in which he and Roundbush labored. Some of it, like the gear they’d been analyzing at Bruntingthorpe, was wreckage, but some was intact, taken from aircraft and vehicles either captured after minimal damage or else abandoned in the retreat.

  Basil Roundbush’s wave was similar but more extravagant, seeming to take in not just what was in the room but all the Lizard equipment the British had captured. He said, “As I see it, we have two jobs of work ahead of us. The first is putting to use the devices we’ve captured that are still in working order. After that comes cannibalizing the damaged ones for parts so that, say, we can build two working ones from the hulks of four.”

  “Understanding how the bleeding things work as well as what they do might also be a good notion,” Goldfarb observed.