Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  Ttomalss almost collided with Tessrek, another researcher into the habits and thought patterns of the Big Uglies. In his arms, none too gently, Tessrek carried the wayward Tosevite hatchling. He thrust it at Ttomalss. “Here. This is yours. Kindly keep better track of it in future. It came wandering into my laboratory chamber, and, I assure you, it is not welcome there.”

  As soon as Ttomalss took hold of it, the hatchling stopped wailing. It knew him, and knew he cared for it. He might as well have been its mother, a Tosevite term with implications far more powerful than its equivalent in the language of the Race.

  Tessrek went on, “The sooner you give that thing back to the Big Uglies, the happier everyone else along this corridor will be. No more hideous noises, no more dreadful stenches-a return to peace and quiet and order.”

  “The hatchling’s ultimate disposition has not yet been determined,” Ttomalss said. Tessrek had always wanted the little Tosevite gone. Its jaunt today would only give him fresh ammunition.

  “Getting rid of it will improve my disposition,” he said, and let his mouth fall open in appreciation of his own joke. Then he grew serious once more: “If you must have it, keep it in your own area. I cannot answer for its safety if it invades my laboratory once more.”

  “Like any hatchling, it is as yet ignorant of proper behavior,” Ttomalss said coldly. “If you ignore that obvious fact and deliberately mistreat it, I cannot answer foryour safety.” To make sure he’d made his point, he turned and carried the hatchling back into his own chamber. With one eye turret, he watched Tessrek staring after him.

  IV

  An ugly little tracked ammunition carrier cameput-putting up to the Panthers halted in the forest north of Lodz. The front hatch of the French-built machine-booty from the triumphant campaign of 1940-opened and a couple of men scrambled out, calling, “Here, lads! We’ve got presents for you.”

  “About time,” Heinrich Jager said. “We were down to our last few rounds for each panzer.”

  “That’s not where you want to be against the Lizards, either,” Gunther Grillparzer added. The gunner went on, “Their armor is so good, you can waste a lot of hits before you get one penetration.”

  The ammunition haulers grinned. They wore one-piece coveralls like the panzer crewmen, but in the field-gray of self-propelled gun units rather than panzer black. One of them said, “New toys for you here-a notion we borrowed from the Lizards and put into production for ourselves.”

  That was plenty to get the panzer men crowding around them. Jager took shameless advantage of his rank to push his way to the front. “What do you have?” he demanded.

  “We’ll show you, sir,” the fellow who’d spoken before answered. He turned to his companion. “Show them, Fritz.”

  Fritz went around to the back of the Lorraine hauler, undid the whitewashed canvas tilt on top of the storage bin at the rear of the machine. He reached in and, grunting a little at the weight, drew out the oddest-looking shell Jager had ever seen. “What the devil is it?” half a dozen men asked at once.

  “You tell ’em, Joachim,” Fritz said. “I never can say it right”

  “Armor-piercing discarding sabot,” Joachim said importantly. “See, the aluminum sabot fits your gun barrel, but as soon as it gets out, it falls off, and the round proper goes out with a lot more muzzle velocity than you can get any other way. It’s capped with wolfram, too, for extra penetration.”

  “Is that so?” Jager pricked up his ears. “My brother is a panzer engineer, and he says wolfram is in short supply even for machine tools. Now they’re releasing it for antipanzer rounds?”

  “I don’t know anything about machine tools,Herr Oberst,” Joachim said, and Fritz’s head solemnly bobbed up and down to signify he didn’t know anything, either. “But I do know these shells are supposed to give you half again as much penetration as you get with regular capped armor-piercing ammunition.”

  “Are supposed to give you.” That was Karl Mehler, Jager’s loader. Loaders had an inherently pessimistic view of the world. When panzers were moving, they didn’t see much of it. They stayed down in the bottom of the turret, doing what the gunner and the commander ordered. If you were a loader, you never had a clue before a shell slammed into your machine. One second, you’d be fine; the next, butchered and burnt. Mehler went on, “How good are they really?”

  Fritz and Joachim looked at each other. Fritz said, “They wouldn’t issue them to front-line units if they didn’t think they’d perform as advertised, would they?”

  “You never can tell,” Mehler said darkly. “Some poor slobs have to be the guinea pigs, I suppose. We must have drawn the short straw this time.”

  “That’s enough, Karl,” Jager said. The rebuke was mild, but plenty to make the loader shut up. Jager turned to the men with the munitions conveyor. “Do you have any of our conventional armor-piercing rounds to use in case these things aren’t as perfect as the people away from the firing line seem to think?”

  “Uh, no, sir,” Joachim answered. “This is what came off the train, so this is what we have.”

  The mutters that rose from the panzer crewmen weren’t quite rumbles of mutiny, but they weren’t rapturous sighs, either. Jager sighed, also not rapturously. “Well, we all still have a few rounds of the old issue, anyhow. We know what that will do-and what it won’t. Tell me one thing right now, you two: is this new round supposed to be able to pierce the frontal armor of a Lizard panzer?”

  Regretfully, the ammunition resupply men shook their heads.“Herr Oberst, the next round that can do that will be the first,” Joachim said.

  “I was afraid you were going to say as much,” Jager answered. “The way things are now, it costs us anywhere between six and ten panzers, on average, for every Lizard machine we manage to kill-that’s just panzer against panzer, mind you. It would be even worse if we didn’t have better crews than they do-but we’ve lost so many veterans that our edge there is going. The thing that would help us most is a gun that would let us meet them face-to-face.”

  “The thing that would help us most is another one of those bombs that they set off outside of Breslau and Rome,” Gunther Grillparzer put in. “And I know just where to set it, too.”

  “Where’s that?” Jager asked, curious to see what his gunner used for a sense of strategy.

  “Lodz,” Grillparzer answered promptly. “Right in the middle of town. Blast all the Lizards and all the kikes there to kingdom come, just like that.” He was wearing gloves, so instead of snapping his fingers he spat in the snow.

  “Wouldn’t mind getting rid of the Lizards,” Jager agreed. “The Jews-” He shrugged. “Anielewicz said he’d keep the Lizards from mounting a counterattack out of the city, and he’s done it. He deserves the credit for it, too. If you ask me.”

  “Yes, sir.” The gunner’s round, fleshy face went sullen, not that Grillparzer didn’t look a little sullen most of the time. He knew better than to argue with his regimental commander, but he wasn’t about to think warm, kind thoughts about any Jews, either.

  Jager glanced around the rest of the panzer crewmen. Nobody disagreed with him, not out loud, but nobody sprang up to say anything nice about the Jews in the Lodz ghetto. That worried Jager. He wasn’t massively enamored of Jews himself, but he’d been horrflied when he learned what German forces had done to them in the areas theReich had conquered. He hadn’t wanted to learn about such things, but he’d had his nose rubbed in them, and he was not the sort of man who could pretend he was blind when be wasn’t. A lot of German officers, he’d found to his dismay, had no trouble at all managing that.

  Right this second, though, he didn’t have to think about it “Let’s share out what they’ve brought us,” he told his men. “If all you’ve got is a dead pig, you eat pork chops.”

  “This stuff is liable to turn us all into dead pigs,” Karl Mehler muttered under his breath, but that didn’t keep him from taking his fair share of the newfangled rounds. He stowed them in the Panther’s ammun
ition bins. “It doesn’t look right,” he grumbled when he scrambled back out of the panzer. “It looks funny. We’ve never had anything like it before.”

  “Intelligence says one of the reasons we drive the Lizards crazy is that we keep coming up with new things,” Jager said. “They don’t change, or don’t change much. Do you want to be like them?”

  “Well, no, sir, but I don’t want to change for the worse, either, and not for the hell of it,” Mehler said. “These things look like a sausage sticking out of a bun, like some engineer is having a joke with us.”

  “They don’t pay off on looks,” Jager answered. “If these new shells don’t work the way they’re supposed to, then somebody’s head rolls. First, though, we have to find out.”

  “If these new shells don’t work the way they’re supposed to, our heads roll,” Karl Mehler said. “Maybe somebody else’s head rolls afterwards, but we won’t get to watch that.”

  Since Mehler was right, the only thing Jager could do was glare at him. With a shrug, the loader climbed back into the turret. A moment later, Gunther Grillparzer followed him. Jager climbed in, too, and flipped up the lid to the cupola so he could stand up and see what he was doing. The driver, Johannes Drucker, and the hull gunner, Bernhard Steinfeldt, took their positions at the front of the Panther’s fighting compartment.

  The big Maybach petrol engine started up. Steam and stinking exhaust roared from the tailpipe. All through the clearing, Panthers, Tigers, and Panzer IVs were coming to life. Jager really thought of it that way: they seemed like so many dinosaurs exhaling on a cold winter’s morning.

  Drucker rocked the Panther back and forth, going from low gear to reverse and back, to break up the ice that accumulated overnight between the panzer’s interleaved road wheels. That freeze-up problem was the only drawback to the suspension; it gave a smooth ride over rugged terrain. But sometimes even rocking the panzer wouldn’t free up the road wheels. Then you had to light a fire to melt the ice before you could get going. If the enemy attacked you instead of the other way around, that could prove hazardous to your life expectancy.

  But today, the Germans were hunters, not hunted-at least for the moment. The panzers rolled out of the clearing. With them came a few self-propelled guns and a couple of three-quarter-tracked carriers full of infantrymen. Some of the foot soldiers carried hand-held antipanzer rockets-another idea stolen from the Lizards. Jager thought about remarking on that to his crewmen, but decided not to bother. They were doing fine as things stood.

  Against the Poles, against the French, against the Russians, theWehrmacht panzers had charged out ahead of the infantry, cutting great gaps in the forces of the enemy. Do that against the Lizards and your head would roll, sure as sure. The only way you had any hope of shifting them was with a combined-arms operation-and even then, you’d better outnumber them.

  Jager would have been just as well content to find no trace of the aliens. He knew how many times he’d been lucky. Christ crucflied, he’d killed a Lizard panzer with the 50mm gun of a Panzer III back in the days when the Lizards had just come to Earth, and if that wasn’t luck, he didn’t know what was. And here he was, almost two years later, still alive and still unmaimed. Not many who’d seen as much action could say the same.

  Up ahead, the trees thinned out. He got on the all-vehicles wireless circuit. “We’ll halt at the forest’s edge to reconnoiter.” Charge out into open country and you deserved to get slaughtered.

  Foot soldiers in winter white got down from their carriers and trotted ghostlike out across the snow-covered fields. A couple of them had rocket launchers (also whitewashed) on their backs; the rest carried MP-40 submachine guns. Jager had heard Hugo Schmeisser wasn’t involved with the design of that weapon, but it got called a Schmeisser just the same.

  From behind a barn, a machine gun started chattering, kicking up clumps of snow. TheWehrmacht men out in the open dove for whatever cover they could find. Two panzers fired high-explosive shells at the barn to flush out the Lizards in back of it. Not ten seconds later, one of those panzers brewed up, flame and smoke spurting from every hatch and out the top of the cupola.

  Jager’s mouth went dry. “That’s a Lizard panzer there,” he shouted into the microphone to his wireless set. It was stating the obvious-overstating the obvious-but it had to be said.

  “Armor-piercing,” Gunther Grillparzer said to Karl Mehler. “Give me one of the new rounds-we’ll see what they can do.”

  “If they can do anything,” Mehler said gloomily, but he slammed one of the aluminum-sabot rounds into the breach of the Panther’s long 75mm cannon. With a clang, Grillparzer closed it.

  “Range?” Jager asked.

  “Long, sir,” the gunner answered. “Better than fifteen hundred meters.”

  Jager grunted. He didn’t see any other good hiding places for panzers ahead, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any. Even against the one, sending his own panzers out to flank it was more likely to get them picked off one at a time than anything else. The Lizard panzer’s turret had a powered traverse, about which Jager was fearfully jealous.

  He couldn’t just sit here, either. Even if he’d bumped into the last of the Lizard rear guard, that panzer could call down artillery on his head or maybe even summon a helicopter or two. With their rockets, Lizard helicopters made nasty antipanzer weapons, and they chewed up infantry like teething biscuits.

  The barn started to burn, the sole result of the high-explosive shells the Germans had thrown at it That was a break; the smoke would screen his panzers from the Lizards’ eyes, at least until they shifted position. And, set alongside his other options, flanking out the Lizard panzer didn’t look so bad after all.

  He was off to the right of the barn. He ordered out a Tiger from off to the left and a Panzer IV from right out in front That done, he spoke to the driver of his own machine: “Come on, Hans-time to earn our pay. Forward!”

  “Jawoh!”Johannes Drucker sped out into the open country. The Panzer IV fired at the Lizard panzer. Its gun wasn’t much worse than the Panther’s, but at long range its odds of doing anything useful were slim indeed.

  A shell knocked down a tree behind the Panzer IV. When the Lizards missed, it was commonly because they couldn’t see well. Their panzer did move out into the open. The Tiger fired at it. The 88 scored a clean hit, but the Lizard panzer kept moving. It was unfair, how tough they were.

  The cannon in that panzer spoke. The Tiger’s turret flew off, shells inside exploding as it crashed to the ground five or six meters away from the stricken panzer. The chassis burned merrily, too. All five crewmen had to be dead. An infantryman fired an antipanzer rocket at the Lizard machine. He hit it right in the glacis plate, but the Lizard panzer’s frontal armor-from what Jager had heard, it wasn’t just steel-defeated the shaped-charge warhead. The machine gun kept searching for Germans on foot.

  “Range?” Jager said again.

  “Down under five hundred meters, sir,” Gunther Grillparzer answered.

  “Driver halt,” Jager said, and then, “Fire!”

  Because he was still standing up in the cupola rather than sheltered in the turret, the noise was like the end of the world. A tongue of flame spurted from the cannon’s muzzle.

  Flame and smoke spurted from the Lizard panzer, too. “Hit!” everybody in Jager’s panzer screamed together. Jager listened to the breech clang shut on another round. The long 75mm gun bellowed again-another hit. Hatches popped open in the Lizard machine. The Panther’s hull-mounted machine gun started barking in short, precise bursts. In moments, the three Lizards who’d bailed out lay motionless on the ground, their all too humanly red blood staining the snow. Their panzer kept on burning.

  Very seriously, Gunther Grillparzer said, “Sir, this is good ammunition. We can get good use from it.”

  “Even if it looks funny?” Jager teased.

  “Even so.”

  The west wind brought the yellow dust of the Gobi with it. The dust left a thin film over
everything; you could taste it if you smacked your lips a couple of times. Nieh Ho-T’ing was used to it. It came with life in and around Peking.

  Major Mon rubbed at his eyes. The dust bothered him. In fair Chinese, he asked Nieh, “So-what do you want from me now? More timers? I hear you did well with the last batch.”

  “No, not this time,” Nieh answered. His first thought was that the Japanese major was a fool if he thought a trick would work against the Lizards twice running. But the eastern devil could not have been a fool, not if he’d kept his force in being this long even with the Lizards, the People’s Liberation Army, the troops loyal to the Kuomintang reactionary clique, and the Chinese peasantry all arrayed against him.

  What then? Nieh’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a grin that showed scant amusement. The likeliest explanation was that Major Mori hoped he’d try the same trick twice in a row-and get smashed as a result. In Mori’s boots, Nieh would have hoped for something like that.

  “Well, whatare you after now?” Mori demanded. Although the troops he led were hardly more than a guerrilla band, he kept all the arrogance the Japanese had shown when they held the whole of northeastern China and coastal enclaves elsewhere-and could push forward as they wished, even if they couldn’t always hold the gains they’d made.

  “Artillery shells would be useful about now,” Nieh said musingly.

  “Maybe so, but you won’t get them from us,” Mon said. “We still have some 75mm guns in commission, though I won’t tell you where.”

  Nieh Ho-T’ing knew where the Japanese were concealing those cannon. Going after them struck him as being more trouble than it was worth, since they were far more likely to be turned on the Lizards than on his own men. He said, “Soldiers can be coolies and haul 75mm guns from one place to another. As you say, they are also easy to hide. But the Japanese Army used to have heavier artillery, too. The scaly devils destroyed those big guns, or else you’ve had to abandon them. But you still should have some of the ammunition left. Do you?”