In th Balance

by neetha Napew

  Mutt Daniels was sitting on that side of the train, too. "Awful damn bright one is right," the manager said. "Never seen one like that in all my born days. It just keeps hangin' up there, don't seem to move a-tall. Kind of pretty, matter of fact."

  The light went from white to yellow to orange to red, fading little by little over several minutes. Yeager thought about getting up and having a look at where it was coming from. He might have done it if Sullivan hadn't compared it to something you'd see on the Fourth of July. Ever since the Fourth when he broke his ankle, he'd had no use for fireworks. He stuck

  his nose back into his Astounding.

  The rising sun snuck under Heinrich Jager's eyelids, pried his eyes open. He groaned, shook a few of the cobwebs out of his head, got slowly to his feet. Moving as if every joint in his body were rusty, he got in line for breakfast. More kasha stew, his nose told him. He shrugged. It would keep him full.

  "No more lights in the sky?" he asked Ernst Riecke, who looked as tired as he felt.

  "No, sir," the captain answered. "I don't know if I should have bothered you, but—"

  "You did the right thing," Jager said, mentally adding, even if it did cost me another hour in my blanket. "I don't know what the devil that was. It looked like one of our recognition

  flares, but it was a million times as big and bright. And it didn't fall, either. It stayed in one place till it went out. I wonder what it was."

  "One of Ivan's tricks, maybe," Riecke suggested.

  "Maybe," But Jager didn't believe it. "If it was, though, he should have followed it up. No bombers, no artillery... If the Russians were trying something, it didn't work."

  Like the rest of the tankmen, Jager gulped down his stew. When everyone was fed, he reluctantly sent the field kitchen on its way. He hated to part with it, but it wouldn't be able to keep up with the tanks.

  One after another, the Panzer Ills rumbled into life. The whole company let out a cheer when the motor of the twelfth tank caught. Jager shouted as loud as anybody. He didn't think they'd be facing enemy armor today, but you

  never could tell in Russia. And if not today, then one day before too long.

  He clambered up into the turret of the tank he personally commanded, radioed division headquarters to see if orders had changed since yesterday. "No, we still want you to shift to map square B-9," the signal lieutenant answered. "How do you read my transmission, by the way?"

  "Well enough," Jager said. "Why?"

  "We had some trouble earlier," the signalman answered. "After that explosion in the sky, reception went into the toilet for a while. Glad it didn't trouble you."

  "Me, too," Jager said. "Out." He unfolded his map, studied it. If he was where he thought he was, he and his panzers needed to make about twenty kilometers to get to where they were supposed to be. He leaned down into

  the crew compartment of the tank, called to the driver. "Let's go. East."

  "East it is." Dieter Schmidt put the Panzer III into gear. The roar of the Maybach HL12OTR engine changed pitch. The tank began to roll ahead, chewing two lines through the grass and dirt of the steppe. The engine went up the scale and down, up and down, as Schmidt worked his way through the six forward speeds of the gearbox.

  The dustbin cupola at the back of the turret gave a decent view even when closed down. Like any tank commander worth his black coveralls, Jager left it open and stood up in it whenever he could. Not only could he see more than even through good periscopes, the air was fresher and cooler and the racket less— or at least different. He traded being surrounded by engine rumble for the iron clash and rattle of the spare wheels and tracks lashed to the tank's rear deck.

  He frowned a little. If the German logistics train were better run, he wouldn't have had to carry his own spares to make sure they were there when he needed them. But the eastern front ran more than three thousand kilometers from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Expecting the high foreheads who were out of harm's way to care what happened to any one tank commander was too much to hope for.

  The panzers rolled through the detritus of battle, past graves hastily dug in the rich dark soil of the Ukraine; past stinking, bloated Russian corpses still unburied; past wrecked trucks and tanks of both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. German engineers swarmed over those like flies over the corpses, salvaging whatever they could.

  The gently rolling country stretched in all directions as far as the eye could see. Not even war's wounds scarred it too Severely. Sometimes when Jager looked out across

  that sea of green, his dozen tanks seemed all alone. He grinned when, off in the distance, he spied a German infantry company.

  Once or twice, planes buzzed by overhead. That made him grin more widely. Somewhere east of Izyum, Ivan was going to catch hell.

  A noise like the end of the world— the panzer a couple of hundred meters to his right went up in a fireball. One second it was there, the next nothing but red and yellow flame and a column of black, greasy smoke mounting to the sky. A moment later came the barks of secondary explosions as the tank's ammunition began going off. The five-man crew couldn't have known what hit them. Jager told himself that, anyhow, as he dove down inside the turret.

  "What the fuck was that?" asked Georg Schultz. The gunner had heard the blast through thick steel and through the racket of

  his own tank's motor.

  "Joachim's tank just went up," Jager answered "Must have bit: a mine— but the Ivans aren't supposed to have laid any mines around here." His voice showed his doubt, the explosion had been very violent for a mine. Maybe if the blast went up into the gas tank, the captain thought. No sooner had the idea crossed his mind then another panzer went up with an even louder detonation than the first.

  "Jesus!" Schultz shouted. He stared fearfully at the metal floor of the tank, as if wondering when a white-hot jet of flame would burst through it.

  Jager grabbed for the radio that linked him with the rest of the company, hit the all-hands frequency. "All halt!" he bawled. "We're hitting mines." He shouted the order forward to Dieter Schmidt, then stood up in the cupola to

  make sure it was being obeyed.

  The ten surviving tanks of the company did stop. The rest of the commanders bounced up just like Jager, each of them trying to see what was going on. But for two blazing hulks, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Jager was about to call divisional headquarters to ask for a sapper detachment when a lance of fire tore across the sky and blew the turret clean off one of the stopped panzers. The oily chassis promptly began to burn.

  Cursing his own mistake, Jager let himself fall back into the turret. He grabbed the radio, screamed, "Get moving! They're rockets from the air, not mines! The Ivans must have found some way to mount Kasyushas on their ground-attack planes. If we stay where we are, we're sitting ducks." He didn't need to relay the order to Schmidt this time; his Panzer III was already lurching ahead, the engine roaring flat out.

  Only as the captain went up into the cupola again did he consciously realize the trail of fire in the sky had come from the west, from behind him. "Turn the turret around!" he yelled, and cursed the hydraulics as the heavy dome of metal ever so slowly began to traverse. A couple of the other commanders had been more alert. Their tanks' turrets were already slewing to the rear.

  Jager turned that way himself. As he did so, a fourth panzer was hit in the engine compartment. Flames began to spurt. Turret doors flew open; men started bailing out. One, two, three... commander, gunner, loader. Fire washed over the whole tank. The driver and hull gunner never had a chance.

  The company commander frantically scanned the sky. Where was the Stormovik, the armored Russian attack plane that was likeliest to be carrying Katyusha rockets? His heart leapt when he spotted a flying shape.

  The coaxial 7.92mm machine guns of the company's faster-reacting panzers spat flame at it. They weren't likely to hurt it, but might keep the pilot from making a low firing run.

  They didn't. Here he came. Jager got ready to thro
w himself behind the turret's armor the instant the Stormovik's guns started shooting back. Then, as the plane drew swiftly nearer, he noticed it wasn't a Stormovik. And when it fired, its whole blunt nose went yellow-white with the muzzle blast. Dust fountained around two more panzers. Both of them stopped dead. Smoke poured from them. Along with the reek of flaming gas and oil and cordite, Jager's nose caught the roast-pork stink of burning human flesh.

  The airplane passed overhead, almost close enough to touch. In spite of everything, Jager stared at it in disbelief. It was almost the size of a medium bomber, and had no propeller he could see. It bore neither the German cross

  and swastika nor the Soviet star; in fact, it bore no device at all on its camouflaged wings and body. And it did not roar like every other airplane he had ever known— it shrieked, as if its motive power came from damned souls.

  Then it was gone, vanishing into the east more swiftly than any fighter Jager knew. He gaped after it, mouth fallen open in most unofficerlike fashion. One pass, and half his company was flaming wreckage.

  Like his own, Ernst Riecke's panzer had survived the onslaught. It came rattling over. Riecke was standing up in his cupola. The captain's face bore the same expression of stunned disbelief Jager knew his own did. "What—" Riecke had to try twice before he could get the words out. "What the devil was that?"

  "I don't know." Jager found an even worse question: "What if it comes back?"

  The Japanese were looting the village. They'd already shot a couple of people for protesting when their possessions were hauled away. The bodies lay as mute warnings in the square beside the ruined wall of the yamen. As if they did not suffice, the invading soldiers swaggered around with fixed bayonets, ready to spit anyone who gave them so much as a hard look.

  Liu Han had done her best to make herself invisible to the Japanese. She knew how they recruited their pleasure battalions. Ashes grayed her hair, charcoal added not just filth but also lines to her face, giving her the look of a much older woman. Grief made it easy for her to assume the stooped posture of the elderly. She wandered aimlessly around the edges of the village, in part to keep away from the soldiers, in part because, with home and family gone, she had nothing better to do.

  Because she kept away from the noisy chaos that engulfed invaders and townsfolk alike, she might have been the first to hear the thuttering in the air. Her head came up in fright — more bombers on the way? But surely not, not when the village already lay under the Japanese boot.

  Or could they be Chinese planes? If the Kuomintang government wanted to hold Hankow, it would need to fight back with everything it had. And the noise was growing from the south! Fear and excitement warred within Liu Han. She wanted the Japanese dead, but did she wish to die with them?

  In spite of her anguish, she decided she wanted to live. Stoop forgotten, she ran for the woods— the farther from the village when bombs began to fall, the better. The drone of approaching aircraft swelled in her ears.

  She threw herself down in a tangle of bushes

  and ferns. By then the planes were almost overhead. She, stared up at them through tree branches. Despite anguish and terror, her eyes went wide. The planes she was used to had graceful, birdlike bodies. These flying— things— looked more like dragonflies. They were angular, awkward-seeming, with landing gear projecting from their bodies like insect legs. And they had no wings! If anything save magic kept them in the air, it was the whirling disk above each of them.

  They hovered in midair like dragonflies, too. Liu Han had never heard of an airplane that could do such a thing, but then, all she knew of airplanes was the death and devastation they brought.

  There these dragonfly planes proved no exception. As they hung in the sky, they fired machine guns and rockets into Liu Han's poor bleeding village. Screams pierced the rattle of gun-fire and the crash of explosions. So did

  the deep, harsh cries of the Japanese soldiers. Liu shuddered to hear them; they reminded her of the baying of wolves. Seeing the invaders lashed with such pitiless fire almost made her forget the ruination, of her village.

  Then a machine gun began to chatter inside the ruins of the yamen. The Japanese were doing their best to fight back. Tracer bullets drew fiery lines up toward the dragonfly planes. Two rockets snarled groundward. A roar, a flash of light, and the machine gun fell silent. Forgetting she was supposed to be in hiding, Liu Han let out a delighted screech. With chaos all around who was likely to hear one more screech?

  A couple of dragonfly planes settled toward the ground, floating through the air as light as windborne snow. Doors opened in their sides as they touched down. Liu Han saw motion inside them. Holding her breath, she waited

  for soldiers to leap out and finish slaughtering the Japanese.

  Could they really be men of the Kuomintang? Liu Han hadn't imagined that her country boasted such marvelous airplanes. Maybe they came from America! The Americans were supposed to be the most clever of all the foreign devils when it came to machines— and they were fighting the Japanese, too. Liu Han had seen an American once, a big, fat Christian missionary who spoke bad Chinese. He'd sounded very fierce, she remembered. She imagined big, fierce American soldiers springing out of the, dragonfly planes, each with a sparkling bayonet half as long as he was tall. She hugged herself with glee at the delicious thought.

  Helmeted soldiers began springing out of the dragonfly plane. They were not big, fierce Americans. They were not Chinese troops, either. Liu Han's glee turned to horror in the

  space of a single breath. The Chinese commonly called foreigners "devils"; just a moment before, Liu Han had been thinking about American devils. But here were devils in truth!

  They were shorter than people, and skinnier. Their green-brown hides glistened in the afternoon sun like snakeskin. They had no noses; instead, the bottom parts of their faces were pulled out in short muzzles— Liu Han thought first of cats, then of lizards. The devils had tails, too, short blunt ones that hung a third of the way down to their knees. Liu Han rubbed her eyes, hard, but when she opened them again, the devils were still there. She moaned, deep in her throat.

  The devils did not move like people, either. Liu Han thought of lizards again; the devils' motion had something of that same loose-joined skitter to it. And when they were still, they were absolutely still, in a way no human

  save a meditating monk could match.

  They did not act like monks. They had things that looked like guns in their hands. The things were guns— they started firing into the village. And what guns! Instead of the bang, bang, bang of ordinary rifles, the devils' weapons spat streams of bullets like machine guns.

  Despite their barrage, despite the rockets and gunfire from the dragonfly planes, Japanese soldiers in the village kept shooting. The devils on the ground advanced against the invaders, some rushing forward while others covered them. Had she been attacked by such monsters, Liu Han knew she would have either given up at once or fled. The Japanese did neither. They fought on until they were all killed. It did not take long.

  By the time the little battle ended, the whole village was on fire. Peering through a screen

  of brush, Liu Han saw the townsfolk, those who still lived, scattering in all directions save toward her (the dragonfly planes on the ground were a potent argument against running that way).

  After a few minutes, a couple of villagers did come toward the dragonfly planes, chivvied along by the devils with guns. One of those devils lay on the grass just outside the houses. The blood that splashed its scaly hide was red as a man's. Liu Han rubbed her eyes again. She hadn't thought devils could bleed.

  Some of the hovering dragonfly planes flew off to the north. Before long, they began firing again. Good Liu Han thought. They're killing more Japanese.

  With resistance in the' village— and the village itself— destroyed, the little scaly devils on the ground began prowling about, as if to

  make sure no more enemies lurked nearby. When one came in her directi
on, Liu Han frantically tried to bury herself under leaves and branches. If the Amida Buddha was kind, the devil would not see her.

  The compassionate Buddha must have been looking somewhere else. The scaly devil yelled something in whatever language devils used among themselves. Liu Han shivered under her makeshift shelter, but did not come out. Then the devil's gun roared. Bullets snarled through the branches around her.

  The devil yelled again. She knew it could have killed her had it cared to, so maybe it was ordering her to give up. She stood up, raised her hands above her head. "P-please don't shoot me, master devil," she quavered.

  When the devil spoke once more, she saw it had lots of small pointed teeth and a long forked tongue like a lizard's. One of its eyes

  kept looking at her. The other, unnervingly, swiveled this way and that. When Liu Han took a step toward the devil, it sprang backward and raised its gun in clear warning.