“Security,” the male on the other end said.
“Not enough of it, evidently,” Atvar said, acid in his voice. “What was it that just impacted on us?”
The male in Security paused a moment, no doubt to check his caller’s code. When he realized to whom he was speaking, he got deferential in a hurry. “Exalted Fleetlord, that was a small, I would say locally made, rocket detonating against our armored facade here. No casualties, minimal damage. A lot of smoke, a lot of noise. Maybe the Big Uglies will think they really did something. They did not, and I will take an oath by the Emperor’s name on it.”
“Very well. Thank you.” Atvar broke the connection. He turned an eye turret toward Pshing. “The fanatics, as you could have guessed for yourself. I wonder which of the Deutsche or the Russkis or the British stirred them up to this latest round of madness.”
“Exalted Fleetlord, did anyone necessarily stir them up?” Pshing asked. “They are Tosevites, and so quite able to stir themselves up.”
“I wish I could say you were wrong,” Atvar said mournfully. “But you are correct, as we have seen again and again to our sorrow. And the male in Security believes it to have been a locally made rocket. Perhaps that is just as well. One of the independent not-empires might well have furnished the fanatics with something more lethal.”
He wished Tosev 3 had been as the Race fondly believed it would be. Had that been so, he would now have been turning over his duties to the fleetlord of the colonization fleet. He would have gone down in the records of four worlds as Atvar the Conqueror. For tens of thousands of years to come, hatchlings of four races would have learned of him in their lessons. Conquerors were rarer by far than Emperors, and more likely to stay in a student’s memory.
He hissed softly. He would go down in history, all right. He would go down as the first male the Emperor had designated a Conqueror to succeed incompletely. He hoped the landing of the colonization fleet would succeed in bringing Tosev 3 firmly within the Empire. On good days, he had some confidence that that would happen. On bad days, he wondered if the Big Uglies wouldn’t end up overwhelming the Race instead.
Today was a very bad day.
Pshing said, “Might it not perhaps be best to transfer our administrative center to the island continent called Australia, where the Tosevite survivors are relatively few and easy to control?”
“Security would be simpler,” Atvar admitted. “But to retreat from a long-established center like this one would be to confess weakness. The Tosevites have excellent scent receptors for weakness. They would only press us harder than ever. Firmness they grasp. Firmness they respect. Anything less, and you are theirs.”
“No doubt you are right, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing said, resignation in his voice. “Our experience on this world certainly suggests as much, at any rate.”
Somewhere in the broad, empty reaches of the Indian Ocean, far, far from any land, a long, lean shark shape drew very near the surface of the sea. But it was vaster than any shark, vaster than any whale-and neither sharks nor whales evolved with conning towers on their backs.
This conning tower never broke the surface. No satellite, no airplane that chanced to be peering down on that particular stretch of sea, could have found a name or a nation to attach to the submarine. All cats are gray in the dark. All submarines look very much alike, seen underwater from above.
A radio mast rose. Ever so briefly, it plowed a tiny white wake in warm, blue-green water. Then it slid down again, down into silence, down into anonymity. The submarine dove deep.
Glen Johnson was harassing one of his Soviet opposite numbers on the radio: something to pass the time on what he expected to be a long, boring mission. “Why did they even bother putting you in the craft, Yuri Alekseyevich?” he asked. “All you are good for is pressing a couple of buttons. They could get a machine to do that. Soon, they probably will.”
“I can do what I have to do,” the Russian answered stolidly. “I am less likely to go wrong than a machine.”
“Cheaper, too,” Johnson suggested. He added an emphatic cough, to show how much cheaper. They were both speaking the Lizards’ language. It was the only one they had in common, which Johnson thought amusing. He didn’t know what the Russian spaceman-cosmonauts, they called themselves-thought of it. Somebody down on the ground was monitoring every word the Russian said. Somebody was monitoring every word Johnson said, too, but he didn’t have to worry about a grilling from the NKVD when he got home.
He was about to rib Yuri some more when a flash of light off to one side of them drew his notice. “What was that?” the Russian asked-he’d seen it, too, then, though his craft had only a couple of little windows, not a canopy with better all-around vision than Johnson had enjoyed in his first fighter plane.
“I don’t know,” he said, and asked a question of his own: “Whose is it?”
Yuri was silent for a little while: probably getting permission from downstairs to talk. “I do not know, either,” he said at last. “Orbits have been confused lately, even worse than usual.”
Johnson gave another emphatic cough-barbarous jargon by Lizard standards, for it modified no previous words, but something humans often did and had no trouble understanding. Then he spoke in English, not for the Russian’s benefit but for his own: “Jesus H. Christ! Somebody’s launched something. Somebody’s launched something big!”
Orbiting fortresses these days could carry a dozen separate rockets and weapons, which could be aimed at either other targets in space or at the ground below. They made Johnson’s blood run cold-they made a lot of people’s blood run cold-because they could start a really big war with bare minutes of warning.
He changed frequencies and spoke urgently into his microphone: “Ground, this is Peregrine. Emergency. Someone has launched. Repeat: someone has launched. I am unable to identify whose satellite it is. Over.”
A voice came back up from a ship in the South Pacific: “Roger that. We are going to alert. Over.”
“Roger.” Johnson knew that meant he would have to run another check on all of his craft’s weapons. He scratched an itch on his scalp. Close-cropped, sandy brown hair rasped against his fingers. He’d had a lot of training. He’d flown a lot of routine missions. Now things counted again. If the fighting started way up here, odds were he wouldn’t make it back down again.
He checked the radar. “Ground, all launches appear to be outbound. Repeat: all launches appear to be outbound.” Intuition leapt. The man broke through the Marine lieutenant colonel for a moment: “Christ, somebody’s gone and launched at the colonization fleet!” After that one shocked sentence, the officer resumed command: “Over.”
“That appears to be correct, Peregrine, ” the inhumanly calm voice on the ground said. Then the fellow’s calm cracked, as Johnson’s had: “What in God’s name are the Lizards going to do about that? Over.”
“I hope they can knock down some of those rockets,” Johnson said. During the Lizards’ invasion, he’d never imagined rooting for them. But he was. The colonization fleet was unarmed; the Lizards had never imagined its ships would need to carry weapons. Attacking them was murder, nothing else but. They couldn’t shoot back. They couldn’t even run.
And, if those ships did go up, what would the Lizards do? That was the wild card, one that made his stubbly hair try to stand on end. During the war, they’d played tit for tat. Every time the humans had touched off a nuclear bomb in a city they controlled, a human-held city went up in smoke immediately afterwards. How much was a ship from the colonization fleet worth?
“Ground,” he said urgently, “whose launch is that?”
“Peregrine, we don’t know,” replied the man at the other end of the radio link.
“Do the Lizards know?” Johnson demanded. “What will they do if they know? What will they do if they don’t know?”
“Those are good questions, Peregrine. If you’ve got any other good questions, please save them for after class.”
Afte
r class was coming fast. Johnson would have launched his own missiles, but they couldn’t match the acceleration of the ones already under way. And, had he launched, the Lizards might have thought he was aiming at them. They knew who he was. Would that make them drop the hammer on the USA?
He didn’t dare find out. All he could do was watch his radar. The Lizards, even counting the ones from the conquest fleet alone, had a lot more stuff in space than mankind did. Surely they would be able to do something. But, from what Johnson could read, none of their installations was close enough to have much chance of knocking out those missiles.
Sitting ducks, he thought. They weren’t sitting, of course; they were orbiting the Earth at several miles per second, as he was. But they had no chance of matching the acceleration of the missiles bearing down on them, and so they might as well have been sitting. A couple of them did start to change their orbits. Several, Johnson was convinced, hadn’t the faintest notion they were under attack.
One after another, fireballs blossomed in space. Johnson squeezed his eyes shut against the intolerable glare of atomic explosions. He wondered how much radiation he was picking up. Peregrine orbited a couple of hundred miles below the ships of the colonization fleet, but he had no atmosphere to shield him from whatever he got.
But, as those sunbursts swelled and faded and dropped behind him, his eyes filled with tears that had nothing to do with mere glare. He’d just watched mass murder committed, watched it without being able to do a thing about it. He checked the radar. If any of the missiles had failed, they would still be outward bound. Someone, Lizards or humans, might be able to track them down and find out who had made them. Whoever had made them, he deserved whatever the Lizards chose to dish out.
Discipline held. He had to report. No doubt the people back at Kitty Hawk already knew what had happened. No doubt the whole world, by now, knew what had happened. He had to report anyhow. “Ground,” he said, “the targets are destroyed. All the targets are destroyed.”
Vyacheslav Molotov did his best to calm the agitated Lizard who had been ushered into his presence. “I assure you, the missiles that destroyed your colonization ships were not of Soviet manufacture.”
Queek, the Lizards’ ambassador to the USSR, made a noise that reminded Molotov of lard sizzling in a hot pan. His translator turned the hisses and splutters into Polish-accented Russian: “Reich ’s Chancellor Himmler has assured the Race of the same thing. President Warren has assured the Race of the same thing. One of you is lying. If we find out who that is, we shall punish his not-empire and not the others. If we do not, we will punish all three not-empires, as we warned we would do. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” Molotov told the interpreter. “Please convey to Queek my sympathy at the Race’s tragic loss. Please also convey to him that any harm coming to our territory will be viewed as an act of war. We did not, we will not, begin the fight: the peasants and workers of the Soviet Union are and have always been peace-loving. But if war comes to us, we shall not shrink from it.”
The translator did his job. Queek made more hot-grease noises. He jumped up into the air. His mouth came open. His teeth were not very large, but they were sharp enough to remind Molotov that Lizards were descended from beasts that hunted for meat. “If you Big Uglies think you can confuse the issue of which of you is guilty and escape all punishment, you are mistaken,” Queek declared.
Molotov had read of an American carnival game where a pea was hidden under one of three nutshells, which were then interchanged rapidly. Anyone who could guess which shell hid the pea won his bet. No-he would have won his bet, save that the fellow with the shells commonly palmed the pea and put it wherever his own economic interests lay.
A typical capitalist system if ever there was one, Molotov thought. It was also one that applied to the present situation. “We did not begin maneuvering with our satellites,” he said. “We joined in to maintain our own security. You also joined in to maintain your security. You were as capable of launching an unprovoked attack as any human nation. You have already launched an unprovoked attack against this entire planet.”
He didn’t think Queek liked that. He didn’t care what Queek liked. Homegrown reactionaries and foreign imperialists had tried to strangle the infant Soviet Union in its cradle. A generation later, the Hitlerites had made peace and war in the space of two years. And, with the Lizards’ invasion piled on top of that of the Nazis, Molotov did not think he could be blamed for doubting their good intentions.
He did not care whether Queek blamed him or not. “In the name of the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union, I repeat to you that we are not responsible for the crime committed against your people,” he said. “I also repeat to you that we shall defend ourselves against any crimes committed against our people.”
“Punishing a crime is not committing a crime,” Queek said. “If you have evidence of who did commit the crime, I suggest you turn it over to us, to escape such punishment.”
Fabricate evidence against the Greater German Reich, was the first thought that went through Molotov’s mind. Fabricate evidence against the USA, was the second. Himmler, he was certain, would be fabricating evidence against the USSR and the USA. And Warren? Like so many Americans, he was self-righteous, but not, Molotov judged, too self-righteous to fabricate evidence against the Reich and the Soviet Union.
His face showed none of what he thought. His face never showed any of what he thought. What he thought was none of his face’s business.
Both of Queek’s eye turrets were aimed at him. The translator studied him, too. He did not worry that they would see behind his mask. The only one who had ever been able to do that was Stalin, and it hadn’t been easy for him.
Queek said, “When the conquest fleet came to Tosev 3, we reckoned you barbarians, fit only to be subdued. Since the fighting ended, have we not treated with the great Tosevite powers as if with equals?”
“More or less,” Molotov admitted. “We had the strength to require you to do this.” One of the reasons the USSR had had that strength was technical help from the USA. Molotov had never let gratitude interfere with doing what seemed most expedient for his own nation.
“Equals do not stage sneak attacks. They do not stage unprovoked massacres,” Queek declared. “These are the actions of barbarians, of savages.”
Now Molotov had to work hard to keep from laughing at the poor, naive Lizard. He thought of Pearl Harbor, of the German invasion of the USSR, of the Siberian divisions thrown into the fight in front of Moscow when the fascists thought his country on the ropes, of a thousand other surprise attacks in the blood-spattered history of the world. Every once in a while, the Lizards showed how alien they were.
“You do not respond,” Queek said.
“You have given me nothing to which to respond,” Molotov replied. “I have told you, we did not attack. If you try to punish us when we are innocent, we will fight back. I have nothing more to say.”
“This is unsatisfactory,” Queek said. “I shall tell the fleetlord it is unsatisfactory.”
“A great many things in life are unsatisfactory,” Molotov said. “The Race has not learned this lesson so well as it might have.”
“I did not come here to discuss philosophy with you,” Queek said. “You have been warned. You would do well to conduct yourself accordingly.” He skittered out of Molotov’s office, the translator in his wake.
Molotov waited till a guard outside reported that they had left the Kremlin. Then he went into a room behind his office and changed his suit. The Lizards were far more adept than humans at making and concealing tiny espionage devices. He had shaken hands with the interpreter. He did not believe in taking chances.
Once changed, he went into another room off the chamber where he kept spare clothes. Another secretary awaited him there. “Tell Lavrenti Pavlovich I wish to speak with him,” Molotov said.
“Of course, Comrade General Secretary.” The secretary made the connection, spoke b
riefly, and nodded to Molotov. “He will be here directly.”
Molotov nodded, as if he had expected nothing less. In truth, he hadn’t; small shows of insubordination were not Lavrenti Beria’s way of showing his own strength. The longtime head of the NKVD did nothing on a small scale.
Bald as a Lizard, Beria walked in about fifteen minutes later. “Good day, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” he said. His Mingrelian accent was close to the Georgian that had flavored Stalin’s Russian: one more thing to unsettle Molotov. But what Molotov would not show to Queek, he would not show to Beria, either.
“Did we do this, Lavrenti Pavlovich?” he asked quietly. “I did not order it. I think it most unwise. Did we do it?”
“Not on my order, Comrade General Secretary,” Beria answered.
“That is not responsive,” Molotov said. He did not think Beria could realistically aim for the top spot in the Soviet hierarchy; too many Russians would have resented having a second man from the Caucasus set above them. But the NKVD was a tail that could wag the dog. Without the name, without the formal position of power, Beria held the thing itself. He had held it for many years. If Molotov ever decided to purge him, state security would suffer. But if he ever decided he could not afford to or did not dare to purge Beria, then Beria had more power than he. “Answer the question.”
“If we did this, I do not know of it,” Beria said. Molotov was not sure that was responsive, either. Then the NKVD chief amplified it: “If we did this, no one in my ministry knows of it. Whether anyone in the Ministry of Defense knows of it, I cannot say with certainty.”
“They would not dare,” Molotov said. The Red Army, the Red Air and Space Forces, and the Red Navy were firmly subordinated to Communist Party control. The NKVD, being an arm of the Party, was less so. He scratched at his graying mustache. “I am sure they would not dare.”
“I think you are right.” Beria nodded; the golden gleam of the electric lights above him reflected from his bald pate. “Still… you want to be sure you are right, eh?”
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