Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  “Truth,” Saltta said. “Troth, no doubt. But these Big Uglies are still wild and ignorant. Only with the passage of generations will they come to see us as their proper overlords and the Emperor”-he lowered his eyes, as did Ttomalss-“as their sovereign and the solace of their spirits.”

  Ttomalss wondered if the conquest of Tosev 3 could be accomplished. Even if it was accomplished, he wondered if the Tosevites could be civilized, as the Rabotevs and Hallessi had been before them. It was refreshing to hear a male still convinced of the Race’s power and the rightness of the cause.

  North of the market, the streets were narrow and jumbled. Ttomalss wondered how Saltta found his way through them. The comfortable warmth was a little less here; the Big Uglies, for whom it was less comfortable, built the upper stories of their homes and shops so close together that they kept most of Tosev’ s light from reaching the street itself.

  One building had armed males of the Race standing guard around it. Ttomalss was glad to see them; walking through these streets never failed to worry him. The Big Uglies were so-unpredictable was the kindest word that crossed his mind.

  Inside the building, a Tosevite female held a newly emerged hatching to one of the glands on her upper torso so it could ingest the nutrient fluid she secreted for it. The arrangement revolted Ttomalss; it smacked of parasitism. He needed all his scientific detachment to regard it with equanimity.

  Saltta said, “The female is being well compensated to yield up the hatching to us, superior sir. This should prevent any difficulties springing from the pair bonding that appears to develop between generations of Tosevites.”

  “Good,” Ttomalss said. Now he could get on with his experimental program in peace-and if snivelers like Tessrek did not care for it, too bad. He switched to Chinese to speak to the Big Ugly female: “Nothing bad will happen to your hatching. It will be well fed, well cared for. All its needs will be met. Do you understand? Do you agree?” He was getting ever more fluent; he even remembered not to use interrogative coughs.

  “I understand,” the female said softly. “I agree.” But as she held out the hatching to Ttomalss, water dripped from the corners of her small, immobile eyes. Ttomalss recognized that as a sign of insincerity. He dismissed it as unimportant. Compensation was the medicine to heal that wound.

  The hatchling wiggled almost bonelessly in Ttomalss’ grasp and let out an annoying squawk. The female turned her head away. “Well done,” Ttomalss said to Saltta. “Let us take the hatching back to our own establishment here. Then I shall remove it to my laboratory, and then the research shall begin. I may have been thwarted once, but I shall not be thwarted twice.”

  To make sure he was not thwarted twice, four guards accompanied him and Saltta back toward the Race’s base in the little island in the Pearl River. From there, a helicopter would take him and the hatching to the shuttlecraft launch site not far away-and from there, he would return to his starship.

  Saltta retraced in every particular the route by which he had come to the female Big Ugly’s residence. Just before he, Ttomalss, and the guards reached the marketplace with the strange creatures in it, they found their way forward blocked by an animal-drawn wagon as wide as the lane down which they were coming.

  “Go back!” Saltta shouted in Chinese to the Big Ugly driving the wagon.

  “Can’t,” the Big Ugly shouted back. “Too narrow to turn around. You go back to the corner, turn off, and let me go by.”

  What the Tosevite said was obviously true: he couldn’t turn around. One of Ttomalss’ eye turrets swiveled back to see how far he and his companions would have to retrace their steps. It wasn’t far. “We shall go back,” he said resignedly.

  As they turned around, gunfire opened up from two of the buildings that faced the street. Big Uglies started screaming. Caught by surprise, the guards crumpled in pools of blood. One of them squeezed off an answering burst, but then more bullets found him and he lay still.

  Several Tosevites in ragged cloth wrappings burst out of the buildings. They still carried the light automatic weapons with which they’d felled the guards. Some pointed those weapons at Ttomalss, others at Saltta. “You come with us right now or you die!” one of them screamed.

  “We come,” Ttomalss said, not giving Saltta any chance to disagree with him. As soon as he got close enough to the Big Uglies, one of them tore the Tosevite hatching from his arms. Another shoved him into one of the buildings from which the raiders had emerged. In the back, it opened onto another of Canton’s narrow streets. He was hustled along through so many of them so fast, he soon lost any notion of where he was.

  Before long, the Big Uglies split into two groups, one with him, the other with Saltta. They separated. Ttomalss was alone among the Tosevites. “What will you do with me?” he asked, fear making the words have to fight to come forth.

  One of his captors twisted his mouth in the way Tosevites did when they were amused. Because he was a student of the Big Uglies, Ttomalss recognized the smile as an unpleasant one-not that his current situation made pleasant smiles likely. “We’ve liberated the baby you kidnapped, and now we’re going to give you to Liu Han,” the fellow answered.

  Ttomalss had only thought he was afraid before.

  Ignacy pointed to the barrel of the FieselerStorch’s machine gun. “This is of no use to you,” he said.

  “Of course it’s not,” Ludmila Gorbunova snapped, irritated at the indirect way the Polish partisan leader had of approaching things. “If I’m flying the aircraft by myself, I can’t fire it, not unless my arms start stretching like an octopus’. It’s for the observer, not the pilot.”

  “Not what I meant,” the piano-teacher-turned-guerrilla-chief replied. “Even if you carried an observer, you could, not fire it. We removed the ammunition from it some time ago. We’re very low on 7.92mm rounds, which is a pity, because we have a great many German weapons.”

  “Even if you had ammunition for it, it wouldn’t do you much good,” Ludmila told him. “Machine-gun bullets won’t bring down a Lizard helicopter unless you’re very lucky, and the gun is wrongly placed for ground attack.”

  “Again, not what I meant,” Ignacy said. “We need more of this ammunition. We have a little through the stores the Lizards dole out to their puppets, but only a little is redistributed. So-we have made contact with theWehrmacht to the west. If, tomorrow night, you can fly this plane to their lines, they will put some hundreds of kilograms of cartridges into it. When you return here, you will be a great help in our continued resistance to the Lizards.”

  What Ludmila wanted to do with theStorch was hop into it and fly east till she came to Soviet-held territory. If she somehow got it back to Pskov, Georg Schultz could surely keep it running. Nazi though he was, he knew machinery the way a jockey knew horses.

  Schultz’s technical talents aside, Ludmila wanted little to do with theWehrmacht, or with heading west. Comrades in aims though the Germans were against the Lizards, her mind still shoutedenemies! barbarians! whenever she had to deal with them. All of which, unfortunately, had nothing to do with military necessity.

  “I take it this means you have petrol for the engine?” she asked, grasping at straws. When Ignacy nodded, she sighed and said, “Very well, I will pick up your ammunition for you. The Germans will have some sort of landing strip prepared?” The Fieseler-156 wouldn’t need much, but putting down in the middle of nowhere at night wasn’t something to anticipate cheerfully.

  The dim light of the lantern Ignacy held showed his nod. “You are to fly along a course of 292 for about fifty kilometers. A landing field will be shown by four red lamps. You know what it means, this flying a course of 292?”

  “I know what it means, yes,” Ludmila assured him. “Remember. If you want your ammunition back, you’ll also have to mark off a landing strip for my return.”And you’ll have to hope the Lizards don’t knock me down while I’m in the air over their territory, but that’s not something you can do anything about-it’s my wor
ry.

  Ignacy nodded again. “We will mark the field with four white lamps. I presume you will be flying back the same night?”

  “Unless something goes wrong, yes,” Ludmila answered. That was a hair-raising business, but easier on the life expectancy than going airborne in broad daylight and letting any Lizard who spotted you take his potshots.

  “Good enough,” Igancy said. “TheWehrmacht will expect you to arrive about 2330 tomorrow night, then.”

  She glared at him. He’d made all the arrangements with the Nazis, then come to her. Better he should have had her permission before he went off and talked with the Germans. Well, too late to worry about that now. She also realized she was getting very used to operating on her own, as opposed to being merely a part of a larger military machine. She never would have had such resentments about obeying a superior in the Red Air Force: she would have done as she was told, and never thought twice about it.

  Maybe it was that the Polish partisans didn’t strike her as being military enough to deserve her unquestioned obedience. Maybe it was that she felt she didn’t really belong here-if her U-2 hadn’t cracked up; if the idiot guerrillas near Lublin hadn’t forgotten an extremely basic rule about landing strips-

  “Make sure there aren’t any trees in the middle of what’s going to be my runway,” she warned Ignacy. He blinked, then nodded for a third time.

  She spent most of the next day making as sure as she could that theStorch was mechanically sound. She was uneasily aware she’d never be a mechanic of Schultz’ class, and also uneasily aware of how unfamiliar the aircraft was. She tried to make up for ignorance and unfamiliarity with thoroughness and repetition. Before long, she’d learn how well she’d done.

  After dark, the partisans took the netting away from one side of the enclosure concealing the light German plane. They pushed theStorch out into the open. Ludmila knew she didn’t have much room in which to take off. The Fieseler wasn’t supposed to need much. She hoped all the things she’d heard about it were true.

  She climbed up into the cockpit. When her finger stabbed the starter button, the Argus engine came to life at once. The prop spun, blurred, and seemed to disappear. The guerrillas scattered. Ludmila released the brake, gave theStorch full throttle, and bounced toward two men holding candles who showed her where the trees started. They grew closer alarmingly fast, but when she pulled back on the stick, theStorch hopped into the air as readily as one of its feathered namesakes.

  Her first reaction was relief at flying again at last. Then she realized that, compared to what she was used to, she had a hot plane on her hands now. That Argus engine generated more than twice the horsepower of a U-2’s Shvetsov radial, and theStorch didn’t weigh anywhere near twice as much as aKukuruznik. She felt like a fighter pilot.

  “Don’t be stupid,” she muttered to herself, good advice for a pilot under any circumstances. In the Fieseler’s enclosed cabin, she could hear herself talk, which had been all but impossible while she was flyingKukuruzniks. She wasn’t used to being airborne without having the slipstream blast her in the face, either.

  She stayed as low to the ground as she dared; human-built aircraft that got up much above a hundred meters had a way of reaching zero altitude much more rapidly than their pilots had intended. Flying behind the lines, that worked well. Flying over them, as she discovered now, was another matter. Several Lizards opened up on theStorch with automatic weapons. The noise bullets made hitting aluminum was different from that which came when they penetrated fabric. But when theStorch didn’t tumble out of the sky, she took fresh hope that its designers had known what they were doing.

  Then she passed the Lizards’ line and over into German-held Poland. A couple of Nazis took potshots at her, too. She felt like hauling out her pistol and shooting back.

  Instead, she peered through the night for a square of four red lanterns. Sweat that had nothing to do with a warm spring night sprang out on her face. She was so low she might easily miss them. If she couldn’t spot them, she’d have to set down anywhere and then no guessing how long the Germans would take to move the ammunition from their storage point to her aircraft, or whether the Lizards would notice theStorch and smash it on the ground before the ammo got to it.

  Now that she was flying over human-held terrain, she let herself gain a few more meters’ worth of altitude. There! Off to the left, not far. Her navigation hadn’t been so bad after all. She swung theStorch through a gentle bank and buzzed toward the marked strip.

  As she got close to it, she realized it seemed about the size of a postage stamp. Would she really be able to set theStorch down in such a tiny space? She’d have to try, that was certain.

  She eased off on the throttle and lowered the aircraft’s huge flaps. The extra resistance they gave her cut into her airspeed astonishingly fast. Maybe she could get theStorch down in one piece after all. She leaned over and looked down through the cockpit glasshouse, almost feeling for the ground.

  The touchdown was amazingly gentle. TheStorch’s landing gear had heavy springs to take up the shock of a hard descent. When the descent wasn’t hard, you hardly knew you were on the ground. Ludmila killed the engine and tromped hard on the brake. Almost before she knew it, she was stopped-and she still had fifteen or twenty meters of landing room to spare.

  “Good. That was good,” one of the men holding a lantern called to her as he approached the Fieseler. The light he carried showed his toothy grin. “Where did a pack of ragtag partisans come up with such a sharp pilot?”

  At the same time as he was speaking, another man-an officer by his tone-called to more men hidden in the darkness: “Come on, you lugs, get those crates over here. You think they’re going to move by themselves?” He sounded urgent and amused at the same time, a good combination for getting the best from the soldiers under his command.

  “You Germans always think you’re the only ones who know anything about anything,” Ludmila told theWehrmacht man with the lantern.

  His mouth fell open. She’d heard that meant something among the Lizards, but for the life of her couldn’t remember what. She thought it was pretty funny, though. The German soldier turned around and exclaimed, “Hey, Colonel, would you believe it? They’ve got a girl flying this plane.”

  “I’ve run into a woman pilot before,” the officer answered. “She was a very fine one, as a matter of fact.”

  Ludmila sat in the unfamiliar seat of theStorch. Her whole body seemed to have been dipped in crushed ice-or was it fire? She couldn’t tell. She stared at the instrument panel-all the gauges hard against the zero pegs now-without seeing it. She didn’t realize she’d dropped back into Russian till the words were out of her mouth: “Heinrich… is that you?”

  “Mein Gott,”the officer said quietly, out there in the cricket-chirping darkness where she could not see him. She thought that was his voice, but she hadn’t seen him for a year and a half, and never for long at any one stretch. After a moment, he tried again: “Ludmila?”

  “What the hell is going on?” asked the soldier with the lantern.

  Ludmila got out of the FieselerStorch. She needed to do that anyhow, to make it easier for the Germans to get the chests of ammunition into the aircraft. But even as her feet thumped down onto the ground, she felt she was flying far higher than any plane could safely go.

  Jager came up to her. “You’re still alive,” he said, almost severely.

  The landing lamp didn’t give enough light. She couldn’t see how he looked, not really. But now that she was looking at him, memory filled in the details the light couldn’t: the way his eyes would have little lines crinkling at the corners, the way one end of his mouth would quirk up when he was amused or just thinking hard, the gray hair at his temples.

  She took a step toward him, at the same time as he was taking a step toward her. That left them close enough to step into each other’s arms. “What thehell is going on?” the soldier with the lantern repeated. Ludmila ignored him. Jager, his mouth insis
tent on hers, gave no sign he even heard.

  From out of the night, a big, deep German voice boomed, “Well, this is sweet, isn’t it?”

  Ludmila ignored that interruption, too. Jager didn’t. He ended the kiss sooner than he should have and turned toward the man who was coming up-in the night, no more than a large, looming shadow. In tones of military formality, he said,“Herr Standartenfuhrer, I introduce to you Lieutenant-”

  “Senior Lieutenant,” Ludmila broke in.

  “-Senior Lieutenant Ludmila Gorbunova of the Red Air Force. Ludmila”-the formality broke down there-“this isStandartenfuhrer Otto Skorzeny of theWaffen SS, my-”

  “Accomplice.” Now Skorzeny interrupted. “You two are old friends, I see.” He laughed uproariously at his own understatement. “Jager, you sneaky devil, you keep all sorts of interesting things under your hat, don’t you?”

  “It’s an irregular sort of war,” Jager answered, a little stiffly. Being “old friends” with a Soviet flier was likely to be as destructive to aWehrmacht man’s career-and maybe to more than that-as having that sort of relationship with a German had been dangerous for Ludmila. But he didn’t try to deny anything, saying, “You’ve worked with the Russians, too, Skorzeny.”

  “Not so-intimately.” The SS man laughed again. “But screw that, too.” He chucked Jager under the chin, as if he were an indulgent uncle. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t enjoy.” Whistling a tune that sounded as if it was probably salacious, he strolled back into the night.

  “You-work with him?” Ludmila asked.

  “It’s been known to happen,” Jager admitted, his voice dry.

  “How?” she said.

  The question, Ludmila realized, was far too broad, but Jager understood what she meant by it. “Carefully,” he answered, which made better sense than any reply she’d expected.

  Mordechai Anielewicz had long since resigned himself to wearing bits and pieces of German uniforms. There were endless stocks of them in Poland, and they were tough and reasonably practical, even if not so well suited to winter cold as the ones the Russians made.