Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  She buzzed along steadily, not wanting to gain much altitude.

  As long as she was on the Lizard side of the line, she might be shot down as an enemy. Ironic that she’d have to make it to German-held territory to feel safe.

  Safe wasn’t all she hoped she’d feel. By the coordinates, she was returning to the same landing strip she’d used before. With luck, Heinrich Jager would be there waiting for her.

  Off to the right, muzzle flashes blazed in the darkness. Something hit the side of the fuselage, once, with a sound like a stone clattering off a tin roof. Ludmila gave theStorch more throttle, getting out of there as fast as she could.

  That complicated her navigation. If she was going faster, she needed to fly for less time. How much less? She worked the answer out in her head, decided she didn’t like it, and worked it out again. By the time she discovered where she’d gone wrong the first time, a glance at her watch warned her it was time to start looking around for the landing strip.

  She hoped she wouldn’t have to do a search spiral. The Germans were liable to start shooting at her if she buzzed around for too long, and the spiral might take her back over Lizard-held territory if it got too big.

  There! As usual, the lanterns marking the landing strip were small and dim, but she spotted them. Lowering the enormous flaps on theStorch killed airspeed almost as if she were stepping on the brakes on the highway. The light plane jounced to a stop well within the area the lanterns marked off.

  Ludmila flipped up the cockpit door. She climbed out onto the wing, then jumped down to the ground. Men came trotting up toward theStorch. In the darkness, she couldn’t be sure if any of them was Jager.

  They recognized her before she could make out who they were. “There-you see, Gunther?” one of them said. “Itis the lady pilot.” He gave the word the feminine ending, as Jager sometimes did, as she had so often heard Georg Schultz do (she wondered what might have happened to Schultz and Tatiana, but only for a moment: as far as she was concerned, they deserved each other).

  “Ja,you were right, Johannes,” another German answered. “Only goes to show nobody can be wrongall the time.” A couple of snorts floated out of the night.

  Gunther, Johannes-“You are the men from Colonel Jager’s panzer, not so?” Ludmila called quietly. “Is he-is he here, too?” No point pretending she didn’t care; they couldn’t help knowing about her and Jager.

  The panzer crewmen stopped in their tracks, almost as if they’d run into an invisible wall. “No, he’s not here,” one of them-Gunther, she thought-answered. He spoke hardly above a whisper, as if he didn’t want his words to go beyond the span of theStorch’s wings.

  Ice ran down Ludmila’s back. “Tell me!” she said. “Is he hurt? Is he dead? Did it happen before the cease-fire started? Tell me!”

  “He’s not dead-yet,” Gunther said, even more softly than before. “He’s not even hurt-yet. And no, it didn’t happen in the fighting with the Lizards. It happened three days ago, as a matter of fact.”

  “Whathappened?” Ludmila demanded.

  Maddeningly, Gunther fell silent. After a moment when Ludmila felt like yanking out her pistol and extorting answers at gunpoint. If need be, the crewman named Johannes said, “Miss, the SS arrested him.”

  “Bozhemoi,”Ludmila whispered. “Why? What could he have done? Was it on account of me?”

  “Damned if we know,” Johannes said. “This weedy little SS pigdog came up, pointed a gun at him, and marched him away. Stinking blackshirt bastard-who does he think he is, arresting the best commander we’ve ever had?”

  His crewmen muttered profane agreement. It would have been loud profane agreement, except they were all veterans, and wary of letting anyone outside their circle know their thoughts.

  One of them said, “Come on, boys, we’re supposed to be loading ammo into this miserable little plane.”

  “It has to be because of me,” Ludmila said. She’d always worried the NKVD would descend on her because of Jager; now, instead, his nation’s security forces had seized him on account of her. That struck her as frightful and dreadfully unfair. “Is there any way to get him free?”

  “From the SS?” said the crewman who’d just urged getting the 7.92mm rounds aboard theStorch. He sounded incredulous; evidently the Nazis invested their watchdogs with the same fearsome, almost supernatural powers the Russian people attributed to the NKVD.

  But the tankman called Gunther said, “Christ crucified, why not? You think Skorzeny would sit around on his can and let anything happen to Colonel Jager, no matter who’d grabbed him? My left nut he would! He’s an SS man, yes, but he’s a real soldier, too, not just a damned traffic cop in a black shirt. Shit. If we can’t break the colonel out, we don’t deserve to be panzer troopers. Come on!” He was aflame with the idea.

  That cautious crewman spoke up again: “All right, what if we do break him out? Where does he go after that?”

  No one answered him for a couple of seconds. Then Johannes let out a noise that would have been a guffaw if he hadn’t put a silencer on it. He pointed to the FieselerStorch. “We’ll break him out, we’ll stick him on the plane, and the lady pilot can fly him the hell out of here. If the SS has its hooks in him, he won’t want to stick around anyhow, that’s for damn sure.”

  The other panzer crewmen crowded around him, pumping his hand and pounding him on the back. So did Ludmila. Then she said, “Can you do this without danger to yourselves?”

  “Just watch us,” Johannes said. He started away from theStorch, calling, “The pilot’s got engine troubles. We’re going to get a mechanic.” And off they went, tramping through the night with sudden purpose in their stride.

  Ludmila, left by herself, thought about loading some of the German ammunition into theStorch herself. In the end, she decided not to. She might want every gram of power the light plane had, and extra weight aboard would take some away.

  A cricket chirped, somewhere out in the darkness. Waiting stretched. Her hand went to the butt of the Tokarev she wore on her hip. If shooting broke out, she’d run toward it. But, except for insects, the night stayed silent.

  One of theWehrmacht men who marked out the landing strip with lanterns called to her:“Alles gut, Fraulein?”

  “Ja,”she answered.“Alles gut.” How much of a liar was she?

  Booted feet trotting on dirt, coming closer fast… Ludmila stiffened. All she could see, out there in the grass-scented night, were moving shapes. She couldn’t even tell how many till they got close. One, two, three, four… five!

  “Ludmila?” Was it? It was! Jager’s voice.

  “Da!”she answered, forgetting her German.

  Something glittered. One of the panzer men with Jager plunged a knife into the dirt again and again-to clean it, maybe-before he set it back in the sheath on his belt. When he spoke, he proved to have Gunther’s voice: “Get the colonel out of here, lady pilot We didn’t leave any eyes to see who we were”-his hand caressed the hilt of the knife again, just for a moment-“and everybody here is part of the regiment. Nobody’ll rat on us-we did what needed doing, that’s all.”

  “You’re every one of you crazy, that’s all,” Jager said, warm affection in his voice. His crewman crowded round him, pressing his hand, hugging him, wishing him well. That would have told Ludmila everything she needed to know about him as an officer, but she’d already formed her own conclusions there.

  She pointed to the dim shapes of the ammunition crates. “You’ll have to get rid of those,” she reminded the tankmen. “They were supposed to come with me.”

  “We’ll take care of it, lady pilot,” Gunther promised. “We’ll take care of everything. Don’t you worry about it. We may be criminals,ja, but by Jesus we’re not half-assed criminals.” The other tankers rumbled low-voiced agreement.

  Ludmila was willing to believe German efficiency extended to crime. She tapped Jager on the shoulder to separate him from his comrades, then pointed to the open door of the FieselerStorch. “Get
in,” she said. “Take the rear seat, the one with the machine gun.”

  “We’d better not have to use it,” he answered, hooking a foot in the stirrup at the bottom of the fuselage that let him climb up onto the wing and into the cockpit. Ludmila followed. She pulled down the door and dogged it shut. Her finger stabbed at the self-starter. The motor caught. She watched the soldiers scatter, glad she hadn’t had to ask one to spin the prop for her.

  “Have you got your belt on?” she asked Jager. When he said yes, she let theStorch scoot forward across the field: the acceleration might have shoved her passenger out of his seat if he hadn’t been strapped in place.

  As usual, the light plane needed only a handful of ground on which to take off. After one last hard bump, it sprang into the air. Jager leaned to one side to peer down at the landing strip. So did Ludmila, but there wasn’t much to see. Now that they were airborne, the fellows with the lanterns had doused them. She supposed-she hoped-they were helping Jager’s crewmen get the ammunition either under cover or back into the regimental store.

  Over her shoulder, she asked him, “Are you all right?”

  “Pretty much so,” he answered. “They hadn’t done much of the strongarm stuff yet-they weren’t sure how big a traitor I am.” He laughed bitterly, then amazed her by going on, “A lot bigger than they ever imagined, I’ll tell you that. Where are we going?”

  Ludmila was swinging theStorch back toward the east. “I was going to take you to the partisan unit I’ve been with for a while. No one will try and come after you there, I shouldn’t think; we’ll have a good many kilometers between us and German-held territory. Is that good enough?”

  “No, not nearly,” he said, again surprising her. “Can you fly me down to Lodz? If you like, you can let me out of the airplane and go back to the partisans yourself. But I have to go there, no matter what.”

  “Why?” She could hear the hurt in her own voice. Here at last they had the chance to be together and stay together and… “What could be so important in Lodz?”

  “That’s a long story,” Jager said, and then proceeded to compress it with a forceful brevity that showed his officer’s discipline. The more he talked, the wider Ludmila’s eyes got-no, the SS hadn’t arrested him on account of her, not at all. He finished, “And so. If I don’t get back into Lodz, Skorzeny is liable to blow up the town and all the people and Lizards in it. And if he does that, what becomes of the cease-fire? What becomes of theVaterland? And what becomes of the world?”

  Ludmila didn’t answer for a few seconds. Then, very quietly, she said, “Whatever you call yourself, you weren’t a traitor.” She gained a little altitude before swinging theStorch in a rightward bank. Numbers spun round the dial of the compass on the instrument panel till it steadied on south-southeast “We’ll both go to Lodz,” Ludmila said.

  XIX

  Ttomalss must have slept through the opening of the outer door to the building that confined him. The sharp click of the lock to the inner door, though, brought him up to his feet from the hard floor, his eye turrets swiveling wildly as he tried to see what was going on. Next to no light came through the narrow window that illuminated and ventilated his cell.

  Fear coursed through him. The Big Uglies had never come here at night before. Like any male of the Race, he found a break in routine threatening in and of itself. This particular change, he suspected, would have felt ominous even to a Tosevite.

  The door opened. Not one but three Big Uglies came in. Each carried in one hand a lantern burning some smelly fat or oil and in the other a submachine gun. The lanterns were primitive: much the sort of tools the Race had expected the natives of Tosev 3 to possess. The submachine guns, unfortunately, were not.

  In the dim, flickering light, Ttomalss needed a moment to recognize Liu Han. “Superior female!” he gasped when he did. She did not answer right away, but stood looking at him. He commended his spirit to Emperors past, confident they would care for it better than the Race’s authorities had protected his body while he lived.

  “Be still!” Liu Han snapped. Ttomalss waited for the weapon in her hand to stitch him full of holes. Instead of shooting him, though, she set it on the floor. She pulled out something she had tucked into the waist of her cloth leg-covering: a sack made of coarse, heavy fabric.

  While the two males with her kept their submachine guns pointed at Ttomalss, Liu Han came up to him and pulled the sack down over his head. He stood frozen, not daring to resist.If they shoot me now, I will not see the guns go off before the bullets strike, he thought. Liu Han tied the bag closed around his neck, not quite tight enough to choke off his breath.

  “Can he see?” one of the males asked. Then the fellow spoke directly to Ttomalss: “Can you see, miserable scaly devil?”

  Miserable Ttomalss was. “No, superior sir,” he answered truthfully.

  Liu Han shoved him. He almost fell over. When he recovered, she put a hand in the middle of his back. “You walk in the directions I choose for you,” she said, first in Chinese and then in the language of the Race. “Only in those directions.” She used an emphatic cough.

  “It shall be done,” Ttomalss gasped. Maybe they were just taking him out to shoot him somewhere else. But if they were, wouldn’t they have told him as much, so they could enjoy his terrified anticipation? Big Uglies were dreadfully sophisticated when it came to inflicting pain.

  Liu Han shoved him again, lightly this time. He walked forward till she said, “Go left,” and emphasized that by moving the hand on his back in the appropriate way. He turned to the left. Why not? In the sphere of blackness in which he moved, one direction was as good as another. A little later, Liu Han said, “Go right.” Ttomalss went right.

  He had not known where he was when he set out. Had he known, he soon would have become hopelessly lost. He turned right and left and right and left tens of times, with what seemed to him random intervals and choices. The streets of Peking were very quiet. He guessed it was somewhere between the middle of the night and dawn, but could not be certain.

  At last, Liu Han said, “Stop.” Ttomalss did, in apprehension. Was this the moment? Was this the place? Liu Han untied the cord fastening the cloth sack over his head. She said, “Count to one hundred, out loud, slowly, in your language. Then lift off the hood. If you lift it before you reach one hundred, youwill die at once. Do you understand?”

  “Y-Yes, superior female,” Ttomalss quavered. “It shall be done. One… two… three…” He went on, as steadily as he could: “Ninety-eight… ninety-nine… one hundred.” As he reached for the sack, he waited for bullets to tear into him. He yanked the cloth from his head in a quick, convulsive gesture.

  No one shot him. His eye turrets scanned all around. He was alone, at the mouth of one of Peking’s innumerable littlehutungs. He threw down the sack. The softthwap! it made hitting the ground was the only sound that reached his hearing diaphragms. Ever so cautiously, he stepped out into the street onto which thehutung opened.

  To his amazement, he recognized it. It was the Lower Slanting Street, in Chinese theHsia Hsieh Chieh. And there stood the ruins of theCh’ang Ch’un Ssu, the Temple of Everlasting Spring. He knew how to get back to the Race’s headquarters in the center of Peking. He did not know if he would be allowed to do so, but he knew he had to try. The Lower Slanting Street even led in the right direction.

  Before long, he ran into a patrol of males of the Race. Where the Tosevites had let him go, the patrol almost shot him before recognizing him as one of their own.That would have been an irony on which to end his career! But when he told them who he was, they hurried him off to the thoroughly fortified citadel the Race retained in what had been the Forbidden City.

  He was pleased to find his arrival important enough to justify rousing Ppevel. Soon the assistant administrator, eastern region, main continental mass, came into the chamber where Ttomalss was enjoying proper food for the first time in ever so long and said, “I am glad to see you at liberty once more, Researcher. The T
osevites informed us yesterday they would release you, but they are not always reliable in their assertions, as you know.”

  “Truth, superior sir-as I know too well,” Ttomalss said with an emphatic cough. “Did they saywhy they were releasing me? To me, they never gave a reason.” Without waiting for an answer, he dug into the plate of fried worms the cooks had given him. Even though they’d been desiccated for the trip to Tosev 3 and then reconstituted, they were still a taste of Home.

  Ppevel said, “By their messages, partly as a goodwill gesture and partly as a warning: typical of the Big Uglies to try to do both at once.” As if to give his words a different sort of emphatic cough, a rattle of gunfire broke out, off in the distance. He went on, “They say this shows us they can move at will through this city and other cities in this not-empire, releasing whom they will, taking whom they will, killing whom they will. They warn us the struggle to integrate China into the Empire will fail.”

  Before coming down to the surface of Tosev 3, perhaps even before his kidnapping, Ttomalss would have found that laughable, ludicrous. Now-“They are determined, superior sir, and they are both ingenious and surprisingly well armed. I fear they may trouble us for years, maybe generations, to come.”

  “It could be so,” Ppevel admitted, which surprised Ttomalss.

  He said, “While I was a captive, the female Liu Han claimed the Race had granted certain Tosevite not-empires a cease-fire. Can this be so?”

  “It can. It is,” Ppevel said. “These are the not-empires capable of producing their own nuclear weapons and desperate enough to use them against us. China-all of its factions-has no such weapons, and is excluded from the cease-fire. This offends the Chinese, or so it would seem, and so they redouble their annoyances in an effort to be included.”