Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  Acceleration pressed him back in his seat. The Big Uglies knew he was there. Antiaircraft shells burst around his killercraft. Many more, he guessed, were bursting behind him. Try as they would, the Tosevites rarely gave jet aircraft enough lead when they fired at them. That helped keep the Race’s pilots alive.

  He fired a pod of the rockets. A wave of fire seemed to leap from the killercraft toward the artillery positions. The killercraft staggered slightly in the sky, then steadied. The autopilot pulled it out of the dive. He swung it around so he could inspect the damage he’d done. If he hadn’t done enough, he’d make another pass with the second rocket pod.

  That wouldn’t be necessary, not today. “The target is destroyed,” he said in some satisfaction. An antiaircraft gun was still popping away at him, but that didn’t much matter. He went on, “Request new target.”

  The voice that answered wasn’t his usual flight controller. After a moment, he recognized it all the same: it belonged to Aaatos, the male from Intelligence. “Flight Leader Teerts, we have a… bit of a problem.”

  “What’s gone wrong now?” Teerts demanded. What felt like an eternity in Nipponese prisons-to say nothing of the ginger habit he’d developed there-had left him with no patience for euphemism.

  “I’m glad you’re airborne, Flight Leader,” Aaatos said, apparently not wanting to give a straight answer. “Do you remember our talk not so long ago in that grassy area not far from the runways?”

  Teerts thought back. “I remember,” he said. Sudden suspicion blossomed in him. “You’re not going to tell me the dark-skinned Big Uglies have mutinied against us, are you?”

  “Evidently I don’t have to,” Aaatos said unhappily. “You were correct at the time to distrust them. I admit this.” For a male from Intelligence to admit anything was an enormous concession. “Their unit was placed in line against American Big Uglies, and, under cover of a masking firefight, has allowed enemy Tosevites to infiltrate.”

  “Give me the coordinates,” Teerts told him. “I still have a good supply of munitions, and adequate fuel as well. I gather I am to assume any Tosevites I see in the area are hostile to the Race?”

  “That is indeed the operative assumption,” Aaatos agreed. He paused, then went on, “Flight Leader, a question. If I may? You need not answer, but I would be grateful if you did. Our estimates were that these dark-skinned Big Uglies would serve us well and loyally in the role we had assigned to them. These estimates were not casually made. Our experts ran computer simulations of a good many scenarios. Yet they proved inaccurate and your casual concern correct. How do you account for this?”

  “My impression is that our alleged experts have never had to learn what good liars the Big Uglies can be,” Teerts answered. “They have also never been in a situation where, from weakness, they have to tell their interrogators exactly what those males most desire to hear. I have.” Again, memories of his days in Nipponese captivity surged to the surface; his hand quivered on the killercraft’s control column. “Knowing the Tosevites’ capacity for guile, and also knowing the interrogators were apt to be getting bad data on which to base their fancy simulations, I drew my own conclusions.”

  “Perhaps you would consider transferring to Intelligence,” Aaatos said. “Such trenchant analyses would be of benefit to us.”

  “Flying a killercraft is also of benefit to the Race,” Teerts answered, “especially at a time such as this.”

  Aaatos made no reply. Teerts wondered whether the male from Intelligence was chastened or merely insulted. He didn’t much care. The analysts had made foolish assumptions, reasoned from them with undoubtedly flawless logic, and ended up worse off than if they’d done nothing at all. His mouth dropped open in a bitter laugh. Somehow, that left him unsurprised.

  Smoke from burning forests and fields showed him he was nearing the site of the treason-aided American breakthrough. He saw several blazing landcruisers of the Race’s manufacture, and more of the slower, clumsier ones the Big Uglies used. With those were advancing Tosevites, their upright gait and stiff motions making them unmistakable even as he roared past at high speed.

  He loosed the second pod of rockets at the biggest concentration of Big Uglies he could find, then gained altitude to come round for another pass at them. The ground seemed to blaze with the little yellow flames of small-arms fire as survivors tried to bring him down. No one had ever denied that the Tosevites showed courage. Sometimes, though, courage was not enough.

  Teerts dove for another firing run. Pillars of greasy black smoke marked the pyres of hydrocarbon-fueled vehicles; his first barrage had done some good. His fingerclaw stabbed the firing button at the top of the control column. He hosed down the area with cannon fire till warning lights told him he was down to his last thirty rounds. Doctrine demanded that he leave off at that point, in case he had to engage Tosevite aircraft on his way back to base. “The itch take doctrine,” he muttered, and kept firing until the cannon had no more ammunition to expend.

  He checked his fuel gauge. He was running low on hydrogen, too. Adding everything together, he wasn’t much use on the battlefield any more. He headed back to the air base to replenish fuel and munitions both. If the Tosevite breakthrough wasn’t checked by the time he got that done, they’d probably send him straight out again.

  A male of the Race drove the fuel truck up to his killercraft, but two Big Uglies unreeled the hose and connected it to the couplings in the nose of his machine. More Big Uglies loaded cannon shells into his killercraft and affixed fresh rocket pods to two of the hard-points below the wings.

  The Tosevites sang as they worked, music alien to his hearing diaphragms but deep and rhythmic and somehow very powerful. They wore only leg coverings and shoes; their dark-skinned torsos glistened with cooling moisture under a sun that even Teerts found comfortable. He watched the Big Uglies warily. Males just like them had shown they were traitors. How was he supposed to be sure these fellows hadn’t, say, arranged a rocket so it would blow up in the pod rather than after it was launched?

  He couldn’t know, not for certain, not till he used those rockets. There weren’t enough males of the Race to do everything that needed doing. If they didn’t have help from the Tosevites, the war effort would likely fail. If the Big Uglies ever fully realized that, the war effort would also likely fail.

  He did his best to push such thoughts out of his mind. All the electronics said the killercraft was ready in every way. “Flight Leader Teerts reporting,” he said. “I am prepared to return to combat.”

  Instead of the clearance and fresh orders he’d expected, the air traffic control male said, “Hold on, Flight Leader. We are generating something new for you. Stay on this frequency.”

  “It shall be done,” Teerts said, wondering what sort of brainaddled fit had befallen his superiors now. There was a job right in front of his snout that badly needed doing, so why were they wasting their time and his trying to come up with something exotic?

  Since he evidently wasn’t going straight back into action, he dug out his vial of ginger from the space between the padding and the cockpit wall and had a good taste. With the herb coursing through him, he was ready to go out and slaughter Big Uglies even without his aircraft.

  “Flight Leader Teerts!” The traffic control male’s voice boomed in the audio button taped to Teerts’ hearing diaphragm. “You are hereby detached from duty at this Florida air base and ordered to report to our forward base in the region known to the local Tosevites as Kansas, there to assist the Race in its attack on the center bearing the local name Denver. Flight instructions are being downloaded to your piloting computer as we speak. You will also require a drop tank of hydrogen. This will be provided to you.”

  Sure enough, a new truck came rolling up to Teerts’ killercraft. A couple of males got out, lowered the droplet-shaped tank onto a wheeled cart with a winch, and hooked it up under the belly of the killercraft. As he listened to their clattering, he was heartily glad the Race didn’t en
trust that job to Big Ugly hirelings. The potential for disaster was much too high.

  He let out a puzzled hiss. The Tosevites had scored a breakthrough on this front; he knew perfectly well that his bombardment hadn’t halted them single-handedly. Yet the base commander was sending him away to serve on another front. Did that mean the Race was overwhelmingly confident of stopping the Big Uglies here, or that the attack on-what was the name of the place? — Denver, the traffic-control male had called it, stood in desperate need of help? He couldn’t very well ask, but he’d find out.

  He checked the computer. Sure enough, it had the course information for the flight to Kansas. A good thing, too, because he didn’t know where on this land mass the region was. The technicians finished installing the drop tank. They got back into their truck. It sped away.

  “Flight Leader Teerts, you are cleared for takeoff,” the traffic control male said. “Report to the Kansas forward base.”

  “It shall be done.” Teerts gave the engine power and taxied down the runway toward the end.

  Whenever George Bagnall went into the gloom of theKrom at Pskov these days, he felt his own spirits sinking into darkness, too. He wished Aleksandr German had never mentioned the possibility of sending him, Ken Embry, and Jerome Jones back to England. Before, he’d resigned himself to going on here in this godforsaken corner of the Soviet Union. But with even the slightest chance of getting home again, he found both the place and the work he did here ever more unbearable.

  Inside theKrom, German sentries came to attention stiff as rigor mortis. Their Russian opposite numbers, most of them in baggy civilian clothes rather than uniforms that had been laundered too many times, didn’t look as smart, but the submachine guns they carried would chew a man to pieces in short order.

  Bagnall went up the stairs to Lieutenant General Kurt Chill’s headquarters. The stairwell was almost black; neither occasional slit windows nor tallow lamps right out of the fourteenth century did much to show him where to put his feet. Every time he got up to the first floor, he thanked his lucky stars he hadn’t broken his neck.

  He found Embry up there ahead of him, shooting the breeze with Captain Hans Dolger, Chill’s adjutant As far as Bagnall could tell, Dolger didn’t much fancy Englishmen, but he made a point of being correct and polite. As arguments in Pskov had a way of being settled with bullets as often as with words, politeness was a rarity worth noting.

  Dolger looked up when Bagnall came in.“Guten Tag,” he said. “For a moment, I thought you might be one of the partisan brigadiers, but I know that was foolish of me. As well expect the sun to set in the east as a Russian to show up when he is scheduled.”

  “I think being late-or at least not worrying about being on time-is built into the Russian language,” Bagnall answered in German. He’d done German in school, but had learned what Russian he had since coming to Pskov. He found it fascinating and frustrating in almost equal measure. “It has a verb form for doing something continuously and a verb form for doing something once, but pinning down the momentright now is anything but easy.”

  “This is true,” Dolger said. “It makes matters more difficult. Even if Russian had the full complement of tenses of a civilized language, however, I am of the opinion that our comrades the partisan brigadiers would be late anyhow, simply because that is in their nature.” A lot of Germans in Pskov, from what Bagnall had seen, had stopped automatically thinking of Russians asUntermenschen. Captain Dolger was not among their number.

  Aleksandr German arrived twenty minutes late, Nikolai Vasiliev twenty minutes after him. Neither man showed concern, or even awareness of a problem. With the brigadiers in front of him, Captain Dolger was a model of military punctilio, no matter what he said about them behind their backs. Bagnall gave him points for that; he embodied some of the same traits as were found in a good butler.

  Kurt Chill grunted when the Russians and the Englishmen who were supposed to lubricate Soviet-German relations entered his chamber. By the scraps of paper that littered his desk, he’d had plenty to keep him busy while he waited.

  The meeting was the usual wrangle. Vasiliev and Aleksandr German wanted Chill to commit moreWehrmacht men to front-line fighting; Chill wanted to hold them in reserve to meet breakthroughs because they were more mobile and more heavily armed than their Soviet counterparts. It was almost like a chess opening; for some time, each side knew the moves the other was likely to make, and knew how to counter them.

  This time, grudgingly, urged along by Bagnall and Embry, Kurt Chill made concessions. “Good, good,” Nikolai Vasiliev rumbled down deep in his chest, sounding like a bear waking up after a long winter’s nap. “You Englishmen, you have some use.”

  “I am glad you think so,” Bagnall said, though he wasn’t particularly glad. If Vasiliev thought them useful here, Aleksandr German probably did, too. And if Aleksandr German thought them useful here, would he help them get back to England, as he’d hinted he might?

  Lieutenant General Chill looked disgusted with the world. “I still maintain that expending your strategic reserve will sooner or later leave you without necessary resources for a crisis, but we shall hope this particular use does not create that difficulty.” His glance flicked to Bagnall and Embry. “You are dismissed, gentlemen.”

  He’d added that last word, no doubt, to irk the partisan brigadiers, to whomgentlemen should have beencomrades. Bagnall refused to concern himself with fine points of language. He got up from his seat and quickly headed for the door. Any chance to get out of the gloom of theKrom was worth taking. Ken Embry followed him without hesitation.

  Outside, the bright sunshine made Bagnall blink. During the winter, the sun seemed to have gone away for good. Now it stayed in the sky more and more, until, when summer came, it would hardly seem to leave. The Pskova River had running water in it again. The ice was all melted. The land burgeoned-for a little while.

  In the marketplace not far from theKrom, thebabushkas sat and gossiped among themselves and displayed for sale or trade eggs and pork and matches and paper and all sorts of things that should by rights long since have vanished from Pskov. Bagnall wondered how they came by them. He’d even asked, a couple of times, but the women’s faces grew closed and impassive and they pretended not to understand him.None of your business, they said without saying a word.

  Over on the edge of the city, a few scattered gunshots broke out. All through the marketplace, heads came up in alarm. “Oh, bloody hell,” Bagnall exclaimed. “Are the Nazis and Bolshies hammering at each other again?” That had happened too often already in Pskov.

  Gunshots came closer to the marketplace. So did a low roar that put Bagnall in mind of one of the Lizards’ jet fighters, but seemed only a few feet off the ground. A long, lean, white-painted shape darted through the market square, dodged around the church of the Archangel Michael and the cathedral of the Trinity, and slammed into theKrom. The explosion knocked Bagnall off his feet, but not before he saw another white dart follow the course of its predecessor and hit theKrom. The second blast knocked Embry down beside him.

  “Flying bombs!” the pilot bawled in his ear. He heard Embry as if from very far away. After the two blasts, his ears seemed wrapped in thick cotton batting. Embry went on, “They haven’t bothered with theKrom in a long time. They must have found a traitor to let them know our headquarters was there.”

  A Russian, angry at having to serve alongside the Nazis? AWehrmacht man, captured when trying to help Red Army troops he hated worse than any Lizard? Bagnall didn’t know; he knew he never would know. In the end, it didn’t matter. However it had happened, the damage was done.

  He staggered to his feet and ran back toward the fortress that had been the core around which the town of Pskov grew. The great gray stones had been proof against arrows and muskets. Against high explosives precisely aimed, they were useless, or maybe worse than useless: when they toppled, they crushed those whom blast alone might have spared. During the Blitz-and how long ago that seemed! �
� unreinforced brick buildings in London had been death traps for the same reason.

  Smoke began rising from the wreckage. The walls of theKrom were stone, but so much inside was wood… and every lamp in there was a fire that would spread given fuel. The lamps had been given fuel, all right.

  The screams and groans of the wounded reached Bagnall’s ears, stunned though they were. He saw a hand sticking up between two blocks of stone. Grunting, he and Embry shoved one of those stones aside. Blood clung to the base of it and dripped. The German soldier who’d been crushed under there would never need help again.

  Men and women, Russians and Germans, came running to rescue their comrades. A few, more alert than the rest, carried stout timbers to lever heavy stones off injured men. Bagnall lent the strength of his back and arms to one such gang. A stone went over with a crash. The fellow groaning beneath it had a ruined leg, but might live.

  They found Aleksandr German. His left hand was crushed between two stones, but past that he hardly seemed hurt. A red smear beneath a nearby stone the size of a motorcar was all that was left of Kurt Chill and Nikolai Vasiliev.

  Flames started peeping out between stones. The little crackling noise they made was in and of itself a jolly sound, but one that brought horror with it. Soldiers trapped in the rubble shrieked as fire found them before rescuers could. Smoke grew ever thicker, choking Bagnall, making his eyes run and his lungs burn as if they’d caught fire themselves. It was as if he was working inside a wood-burning stove. Every so often, too, he smelled roasting meat. Sickened-for he knew what meat that was-he struggled harder than ever to save as much, as many, as he could.

  Not enough, not enough. Hand pumps brought water from the river onto the fire, but could not hold it at bay. The flames drove the rescuers away from those they would save, drove them back in defeat.

  Bagnall stared at Ken Embry in exhausted dismay. The pilot’s face was haggard and black with soot save for a few clean tracks carved by sweat. He had a burn on one cheek and a cut under the other eye. Bagnall was sure he looked no better himself.