Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  Being taken to the shuttlecraft fascinated the hatchling. Several times on the journey, it saw something new and said, “This?”-sometimes with the interrogative cough, sometimes without.

  “It speaks!” Heddosh said in surprise.

  “Yes, it does,” Ttomalss answered coldly. “It would learn to speak more if I were allowed to continue my experiment, too.” Now the hatchling would have to acquire the horrible sounds of Chinese rather than the Race’s elegant, precise, and (to Ttomalss) beautiful language.

  The clanging noises the shuttlecraft airlock doors made frightened the hatchling, which clung tightly to Ttomalss. He soothed it as best he could, all the while trying to look on the bright side of things. The only bright side he found was that, until he could obtain another newly emerged Big Ugly hatchling, he would get enough sleep for a while.

  More clangings signaled the shuttlecraft’s freeing itself from the starship to which it had been attached. With centrifugal force no longer giving a simulacrum of gravity, the shuttlecraft went into free fall. To Ttomalss’ relief, the hatchling showed no perceptible distress. It seemed to find the sensation interesting, perhaps even pleasant. Data showed that the female Liu Han had had the same reaction. Ttomalss wondered if it was hereditary.

  There was a long-term research project, he thought. Maybe someone could start it after the conquest was safe and secure. He wondered if the day would ever come when the conquest was safe and secure. He’d never imagined the Race making concessions to the Tosevites in negotiations, as Ppevel was in yielding the hatchling to them. Once you started making concessions, where would you stop? That was a chilling thought, when you got down to it.

  The shuttlecraft’s rocket engine began to roar. Acceleration shoved Ttomalss back into his couch, and the hatchling against him. It squalled in fright. He comforted it again, even though its weight pressing on him made him far from comfortable. The hatchling had calmed before acceleration ended, and squealed with delight when free fall returned.

  Ttomalss wondered if the Big Ugly female Liu Han could have done as well with the hatchling, even if she’d kept it since it emerged from her body. He had his doubts.

  When Otto Skorzeny came back to the panzer encampment, he was grinning from ear to ear. “Brush the canary feathers off your chin,” Heinrich Jager told him.

  The SS man actually did make brushing motions at his face. In spite of everything, Jager laughed. Whatever else you could say about him, Skorzeny had style. The trouble was, there was so much else to say. “Off it went,” Skorzeny boomed. “The Jews ate the story up like gumdrops, poor damned fools. They brought up their own wagon to carry the present, and they promised they’d sneak it past the Lizards. I figure they can do that, probably better than I could. And once they do-”

  Jager tipped back his head and slid his index finger across his throat. Chuckling, Skorzeny nodded. “When is the timer set for?” Jager asked.

  “Day after tomorrow,” Skorzeny answered. “That’ll give ’em plenty of time to get the bomb back to Lodz. Poor stupid bastards.” He shook his head, perhaps even in genuine sympathy. “I wonder if anybody’s ever done such a good job of committing suicide before.”

  “Masada,” Jager said, dredging the name up from the long-vanished days before the First World War, when he’d wanted to be a Biblical archaeologist. He saw it meant nothing to Skorzeny, and explained: “The whole garrison killed one another off instead of surrendering to the Romans.”

  “There’ll be more of ’em done in now,” the SS man said. “A lot more.”

  “Ja,”Jager answered absently. He still couldn’t tell whether Skorzeny hated Jews on his own hook or because he’d got orders to hate them. In the end, what did it matter? He’d go after them with the same genial ferocity either way.

  Had the message got through to Anielewicz? Jager had been wondering about that ever since the meeting he, Skorzeny, and the Jewish fighting leader had had in the forest. Anielewicz hadn’t tipped his hand then. Had he got the message and then not believed it? Had he got it, believed it, and then been unable to convince his fellow Jews it was true?

  No way to be sure, not from here. Jager shook his head. He’d have a way to tell, soon enough. If the Jews in Lodz were snuffed out like so many candles day after tomorrow, he could figure somebody down there had decided he was lying.

  Skorzeny had an animal alertness to him. “What’s up?” he asked, seeing Jager’s head go back and forth.

  “Nothing, really.” The panzer colonel hoped his voice sounded casual. “Thinking about the surprise they’ll have in Lodz-for a little while, anyhow.”

  “For a little while is right,” Skorzeny said. “Stupid sheep. You’d think they’d know better than to trust a German, but no, they walked right into it.” He bleated sardonically. “And the lambs’ blood will go up on the doorposts of all the houses.” Jager stared; he hadn’t imagined Skorzeny as a man who knew his Scripture. The SSStandartenfuhrer chuckled again. “TheFuhrer will have his revenge on the Jews, and who knows? We may even kill a few Lizards, too.”

  “We’d better,” Jager answered. “You go and rip the heart out of the human sector of Lodz and there’s nothing to keep the scaly sons of bitches from staging out of it any more. They could hit the bases of our penetrations north and south of the city and cut us right off. That’s too steep a price for theFuhrer’s revenge, you ask me.”

  “Nobody asked you, and theFuhrer doesn’t think so,” Skorzeny said. “He told me as much himself-he wants those Jews dead.”

  “How am I supposed to argue with that?” Jager said. The answer was simple: he couldn’t. So he’d set himself up to circumvent a personal order from theFuhrer, had he? Well. If anyone ever found out what he’d done, he was a dead man anyhow. They couldn’t kill him any deader.No, but they can take longer getting you dead, he thought uneasily.

  He threw himself flat on the ground almost before he consciously heard the shells whistling in from out of the east. Skorzeny sprawled there beside him, hands up to cover the back of his neck. Somewhere not far away, a wounded man was screaming. The bombardment went on for about fifteen minutes, then let up.

  Jager scrambled to his feet “We’ve got to move camp now,” he shouted. “They know where we are. We were lucky that time-far as I could tell, that was all ordinary ammunition coming, none of their special delights that spit mines all over the place so people and panzers don’t dare go anywhere. They’re short of those little beauties, by all the signs, but they will use ’em if they think they can make a profit. We won’t let ’em.”

  He’d hardly finished speaking before the first panzer engines rumbled into life. He was proud of his men. Most of them were veterans who’d been through everything the Russians and the British and the Lizards could throw at them. They understood what needed doing and took care of it with a minimum of fuss and bother. Skorzeny was a genius raider, but he couldn’t run a regiment like this. Jager had his own talents, and they were not to be sneezed at.

  While the regiment was shifting its base, he didn’t have to think about the horror waiting to happen in Lodz, growing closer with every tick of a timer. Skorzeny was right: the Jews were fools to trust any German. Now the question was, which German had they been fools enough to trust?

  The next day, he was too busy to worry about it. A Lizard counterattack drove the German forces west six or eight kilometers. Panzers in the regiment went from machinery to burnt and twisted scrap metal, a couple from the fire of Lizard panzer cannon, the rest because of the antipanzer rockets the Lizard infantry carried. The only Lizard panzer killed was taken out by aWehrmacht private in a tree who dropped a Molotov cocktail down into the turret through the open cupola when the panzer clattered by below him. That happened toward sunset, and seemed to halt the Lizards’ push all by itself. They didn’t like losing panzers these days.

  “We have to do better,” he told his men as they ate black bread and sausage that night. “We got flank targets, but we weren’t hitting them. Ca
n’t make many mistakes like that, not unless we want to get buried here.”

  “But,Herr Oberst,” somebody said, “when they move, they can move so damned fast, they’re by us before we have a chance to react.”

  “Good thing we had defense in depth, or they would have cracked us wide open,” somebody else said. Jager nodded, pleased at the way the troops were hashing things out for themselves. That was how German soldiers were supposed to operate. They weren’t just ignorant peasants who followed orders without thinking about them, as Red Army men did. They had brains and imaginations, and used them.

  He was about to curl up in his bedroll under his Panther when Skorzeny showed up in camp. The SS man was toting a jug of vodka he’d found God only knew where, and passed it around so everybody got a nip. It wasn’t good vodka-the taste put Jager in mind of stale kerosene-but it was better than no vodka.

  “Think they’re going to hit us again in the morning?” Skorzeny asked.

  “Won’t know for certain till then,” Jager answered, “but if I had to guess, I’d say no. They’d have kept pressing harder after it got dark if that was what they had in mind. These days, they push when they think they’ve found a weakness, but they ease up when we show strength.”

  “They can’t afford the kind of losses they get when they go up against a strongpoint,” Skorzeny said shrewdly.

  “I think you’re right.” Jager glanced over at the SS man in the darkness. “We could have used that nerve gas here at the front.”

  “Ahh, you’d say that even if things were quiet,” Skorzeny retorted. “It’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing, right where it is.” He grunted. “I want your wireless people to be alert for any intercepts they pick up about that, too. If the Lizards don’t burn up the airwaves, I’ll eat my hat.”

  “That’s fine.” Jager yawned enormously. “Right now, I’m alert for sleep. You want to crawl in under here? Safest place you can be if they start shelling again. I know damn well you snore, but I suppose I can live with it.”

  Skorzeny laughed. Gunther Grillparzer said, “He’s not the only one who snores-sir.” Betrayed by his own gunner, Jager settled in for the night.

  Spatters of small-arms fire woke him a couple of times. They picked up at dawn, but, as he’d predicted, the Lizards were more interested in consolidating what they’d gained the day before than in pushing on against stiffening resistance.

  Otto Skorzeny hadn’t been kidding when he said he wanted the wireless men to stay alert. He made sure they did, hanging around them and regaling them with what seemed like an endless stream of dirty stories. Most of them were good dirty stories, too, and some were even new to Jager, who’d thought he’d heard every story of that sort ever invented.

  As morning gave way to afternoon, Skorzeny’s temper began to wear thin. He paced through the camp, kicking up dirt and sending spring flowers flying. “Damn it, we should have intercepted something from the Jews or the Lizards in Lodz by now!” he stormed.

  “Maybe they’re all dead,” Jager suggested. The notion horrflied him, but might ease Skorzeny’s mind.

  But the big SS man shook his head. “Too much to hope for. Somebody always lives through these things by one kind of fool luck or another.” Jager thought of Max, the foulmouthed Jew who’d lived through Babi Yar. Skorzeny was right. He went on with a muttered, “No, something’s gone south somewhere.”

  “You think the timer didn’t work the way it should have?” Jager asked.

  “I suppose it is possible,” Skorzeny allowed, “but fry me for aschnitzel if I ever heard of one of them failing before. They aren’t just foolproof, they’re idiotproof, and the gadget had a backup. We send out a goody like that, we want to make sure it works as advertised.” He chuckled. “That’s what people who don’t like us so well call German efficiency, eh? No, the only way that bomb could have failed would have been-”

  “What?” Jager said, though he had an idea as to what. “As you say. If it had a backup timer, it was going to go off.”

  “The only way that bomb could have failed-” Skorzeny repeated musingly. His gray eyes went very wide. “The only way that bomb could have failed would have been for that stinking little kike to pull the wool over my eyes, and dip me in shit if he didn’t do it!” He clapped a hand to his forehead. “The bastard! The fucker! The nerve of him! Next time I see him, I’ll cut off his balls one at a time.” Then, to Jager’s amazement, he started to laugh. “He played me for a sucker. I didn’t think any man alive could do that. I’d like to shake his hand-afterhe’s castrated, not before. You thinkstupid kike and you take it for granted, and this is what it gets you. Jesus Christ!”

  Also a Jew,Jager thought, but he didn’t say it. Instead, he asked, “What now? If the Jews in Lodz know what it is”-and if they do, or guess, it’s thanks to me, and how do I feel about that? — “they’ve got their hands on something they can use against us.”

  “Don’t I know it.” Skorzeny sounded disgusted, maybe with the Jews, maybe with himself. He wasn’t used to failing. Then he brightened. For a moment, he looked like his old, devilish self. “Maybe we can plaster the place with rockets and long-range artillery, hope to blow up the damned thing that way, at least deny the Jews the use of it.” He made an unhappy clucking noise. “It’s bloody long odds, though.”

  “Too true,” Jager said, as if sympathetically. “Those rockets pack a decent punch, but you can’t tell for sure whether they’ll hit the right town, let alone the right street.”

  “I wish we had some of the toys the Lizards know how to make,” Skorzeny said, still discontented with the world. “They don’t just hit the right street. They’ll pick a room for you. Hell, they’ll fly into a closet if that’s what you want.” He scratched at his chin. “Well, one way or another, those Jews are going to pay. And when they do, I’ll be the one who collects.” He sounded very sure of himself.

  Off in the next room at the Army and Navy General Hospital in Hot Springs, there were so many car batteries that they’d had to reinforce the floor to take the weight. Among the Lizard gadgets they powered was the radio set taken from the shuttlecraft that had brought Straha down to Earth when he defected to the United States.

  Now he and Sam Yeager sat in front of that radio, flipping from one frequency to another in an effort to monitor the Lizards’ signals and find out what the Race was up to. Right now, they weren’t picking up much anywhere. Straha had the leisure to turn to Yeager and ask, “How many of our males do you have engaged in the practice of espionage and signal gathering?”

  “Numbers? Who knows?” Sam answered. If he had known, he wouldn’t have told Straha. One of the things he’d had drilled into him was that you didn’t tell anybody, human or Lizard, anything he didn’t have to know. “But a lot of them, a lot of the time. Not many of us Big Uglies”-he used the Lizards’ nickname for mankind unselfconsciously-“speak your language well enough to follow without help from one of you.”

  “You, Sam Yeager, I think you could succeed at this,” Straha said, which made Sam feel damn good. He thought he could have gained even more fluency in the Lizards’ language if he hadn’t also had to spend time with Robert Goddard. On the other hand, he would have learned more about rockets if he hadn’t had to spend time with Straha and the other Lizard POWs.

  And he would have learned more about his baby son if he hadn’t been in the Army. That would have kept Barbara happier, too; he worried about not seeing her enough. There weren’t enough hours in a day, in a year, in a lifetime, to do all the things he wanted to do. That was true all the time, but trying to keep up during a war rubbed your nose in it.

  Straha touched the frequency-advance toggle. The Lizard numbers in the display showed that the radio was now monitoring a frequency a tenth of a megacycle higher (or rather, something that worked out to be about an eighth of a megacycle-the Lizards naturally used their own units rather than those of mankind). A male’s voice came out of the speaker.

  Yeager leaned forw
ard and listened intently. The Lizard was apparently in a rear area, and complaining about rockets falling nearby and disrupting resupply efforts for the troops pushing toward Denver. “That’s good news,” Sam said, scribbling notes.

  “Truth,” Straha agreed. “Your ventures into uncharted technology are paying a handsome profit for your species. If the Race were so innovative, Tosev 3 would long since have been conquered-provided the Race had not blown itself to radioactive dust in innovative frenzy.”

  “You think that’s what we would have done if you hadn’t invaded?” Sam asked.

  “It is certainly one of the higher probabilities,” Straha said, and Yeager was hard-pressed to disagree with him. The ex-shiplord flipped to a new frequency. The Lizard talking now sounded angry as all get-out. “He is ordering the dismissal, demotion, and transfer of a local commander in a region called Illinois,” Straha said. Yeager nodded. The Lizard went on, “Where is this Illinois place?”

  Sam showed him on a map. He was listening, too. “Something about letting a pack of prisoners escape or get rescued or something. The fellow who’s cursing him is really doing quite a job, isn’t he?”

  “If said snout-to-snout, telling a male that someone shit in his egg before it hatched is guaranteed to start a fight,” Straha said.

  “I believe it.” Sam listened to the radio some more. “They’re moving that incompetent officer to-upstate New York.” He wrote it down. “That’s worth knowing. With luck, we’ll be able to take advantage of his weaknesses over there, too.”

  “Truth,” Straha said again, this time in bemused tones. “You Big Uglies aggressively exploit the intelligence you gather, and you gather great quantities of it. Do you do this in your own conflicts as well?”