by neetha Napew
Embry flicked a toggle, made a face. "Flaps aren't responding on that side."
"No hydraulic pressure," Bagnall said after another check of his instruments. He watched the pilot fight the controls; already the Lanc was trying to swing in an anticlockwise circle. "Appears we have a bit of a problem."
"A bit, yes," Embry said, nodding. "Look for a field or a road. I'm going to try to set her down." Still sounding calm, he went on, "Sooner pick my time for it than have the aircraft choose for me, eh?"
"As you say," Bagnall agreed. The pilot's couple of sentences told the same story as his own bank of instruments: the aircraft would not make it back to England. He pointed. "There's as likely a stretch of highway as we're apt to find. One thing for the war— we're not likely to run over Uncle Pierre's Citroen."
"Right." Embry raised his voice. "Crew prepare for crash landing. Mr. Bagnall, lower
the landing gear, if you please."
The right wheel descended smoothly; without hydraulics, the left refused to budge. Bagnall worked the hand crank. From the belly turret, a gunner said, "It's down. I can see it."
"One thing fewer to worry about," Embry remarked, with what seemed to Bagnall to be quite excessive good cheer. Then the pilot added, "That leaves only two or three hundred thousand, unless I miss my count."
"We could be trying this up in Normandy, where the hedge-rows grow right alongside the roadbed," Bagnall said helpfully.
Embry corrected himself: "Two things fewer. You do so relieve my mind, George."
"Happy to be of service," Bagnall answered. Joking about what was going to happen was easier than just sitting back and watching it. A
forced landing in a damaged aircraft on a French road in the middle of the night without lights was not easy to contemplate in cold blood.
As if to underscore that, Embry said, "Aircrew may bail out if they find that preferable to attempting a landing. I shall endeavor to remain airborne an extra minute or two to allow them to avail themselves of the opportunity. Had we suffered this misfortune a month ago, I would bail out myself and permit the aircraft to crash, thus denying it to the Germans. As you have seen this evening, however, that situation has for the moment changed. If you do intend to, parachute, please so inform me at this time."
The intercom stayed silent until someone in the back of the plane said, "You'll get us down all right, sir."
"Let us hope such touching confidence is not
misplaced," Embry said. "Thank you, gentlemen, one and all, and good luck to you." He brought the stick forward, reduced power to the two surviving Merlins.
"To us," Bagnall amended. The road, a dark gray line arrowing through black fields, was almost close enough to reach out and touch. Embry brought the Lane's nose up a little, cut power still more. The bomber met the road with a bump, but Bagnall had been through worse landings at Swinderby. Cheers erupted in the intercom.
Then, just as the Lancaster slowed toward a stop, its right wing clipped a telegraph pole. It spun clockwise. The left landing gear went off the asphalt and into soft dirt. It buckled. The wing snapped off where the shells bad chewed it. The stump dug into the ground. The aircraft's spars groaned like a man on the rack. Bagnall wondered if it would flip over. It didn't. Even as it was spinning, Embry had
shut off the engines altogether.
Into sudden silence, a second round of cheers rang out. "Thank you, friends," Embry said. Now at last, when it no longer mattered, he let himself sound wrung out. He turned to Bagnall with a tired grin. "Est-ce quo vous parlez francais, monsieur?"
"Hell, no," Bagnall answered. They both laughed like schoolboys.
A metallic rumble echoed through 127th Emperor Hetto as the transfer craft's airlock engaged with one of the bannership's docking collars. A speaker chimed softly in Fleetlord Atvar's office. "The Tosevite is here, Exalted Fleetlord," a junior officer announced.
"Fetch him hither," Atvar said. "It shall be done."
Atvar hung in midair as he awaited the arrival of the Tosevite official. He'd ordered the spin taken off the bannership when he began receiving natives. He was used to free-fall; while he did not particularly enjoy it, he endured it without trouble, as did his crew. The Tosevites, however, were without space travel. Finding themselves weightless might fluster them and put them at a disadvantage.
Atvar hoped so, at any rate.
He let his jaws fall open in amusement as he remembered the unfortunate native from the empire called Deutschland who had lost all his stomach contents, luckily while still in the transfer craft. That poor befuddled Ribbensomething had been in no state even to try to negotiate his empire's submission to the Empire.
The door to the office opened. An officer charged with learning the appropriate Tosevite dialect floated outside along with the native for whom he would interpret. The officer said, "Exalted Fleetlord, I present to you the emissary of the empire called the Soyuz Sovietskikh Sotzialesticheskikh Respublik— SSSR for short. His name is Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov."
"Give him my polite greetings," Atvar
answered, thinking the Tosevite empire was too small to deserve such a big name. Like most Tosevites, though, the emissary himself was substantially larger than the fleetlord.
The interpreter talked haltingly in Molotov's speech. Part of the problem was that Tosevite languages did not fit well in the mouths of the Race: to Atvar, all Tosevites sounded as if they had their mouths full of pap. Tosevite languages were also hard for the Race because they were so maddeningly irregular; they had not spent long millennia being smoothed into efficient rationality. And, even without those difficulties, the languages remained incompletely familiar to the officers assigned to learn them. Up until the actual landings on Tosev 3, they'd had only radio transmissions from which to work (the first convenient thing Atvar could see about the Tosevites' possessing radio), and comprehension had emerged slowly out of those, even with the help of computers
programmed to deduce probable word meanings by statistics.
Molotov listened to the fleetlord's greeting, gave back one of his own. Unlike the Tosevite from Deutschland, he had sense enough to speak slowly so as not to overwhelm the interpreter. Also unlike that Tosevite, he gave no sign of discomfiture at being off his home planet and in free-fall for the first time in his life.
A viewscreen showed a hologram of Tosev 3 as it appeared from the 127th Emperor Hetto, but Molotov did not even deign to glance at it. Through the corrective lenses hooked in front of his fiat, immobile eyes, he stared straight toward Atvar. The fleetlord approved. He had not thought to find such singleness of purpose among these big barbarians.
Molotov spoke again, still slowly and without raising his voice. The interpreter turned both
eye turrets toward Atvar in embarrassment; the fleetlord should have enjoyed the privilege of first address. But what could a Big Ugly know of proper protocol? Atvar said, "Never mind his manners. Just tell me what he says."
"It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord. Vyacheslav Mikhailovich— this is the polite way to address the Tosevites who speak Ruskii: by their own name and that of their father— well, never mind that; the Tosevite demands the immediate unconditional withdrawal of all our forces from the land and air belonging to the empire of the SSSR."
"Oh, he does, does he?" The fleetlord let his jaws gape in a guffaw. "Remind him he is in no position to make demands. If he occupied Home, he might have the right to bend us to his will. But it is the surrender of the SSSR that is under discussion, not ours."
Molotov listened to the interpreter's translation
without changing expression. To Atvar, the Tosevites he'd seen and met owned extraordinarily mobile features; his own facial hide and musculature were far less flexible. But this native might have been carved from stone. Still stubbornly ignoring his surroundings, he paused to think, then replied:
"We shall not yield. We have fought the Gitlerites ["By which he means the Deutsch Tosevites, exalted fleetlord," the interpret
er explained] to a standstill when they expected us to collapse. Our land is vast, our resources widespread. We are not to be easily overcome."
"Tell him that his vast empire"— Atvar loaded the word with scorn—"would vanish almost without trace on any of the three worlds of the Empire."
Molotov again listened, thought, answered: "All three of your worlds are not here with you,
and you seek to conquer not just the SSSR but the whole of this world. Consider if you have not overextended yourselves."
Atvar glared at the impassive Tosevite. The native might be barbarous, but he was no fool. A whole world— even a world with too much water like Tosev 3— was a big place, bigger than the fleetlord had truly understood until he began this campaign. He hadn't expected to face industrialized opposition, either.
Nevertheless, he and the Race had advantages, too. He bludgeoned Molotov with them: "We strike you as we please, but you come to grief whenever you try to hit us back. Once all your factories are in ruins, how do you propose to hit back at all? Yield now, and you will still have something left for your own people."
Molotov wore the same sort of bulky garments most Tosevites preferred. His face was damp
and shiny with water exuded as a metabolic coolant; the 127th Emperor Hetto was at a temperature comfortable to the Race, not for natives. But he still answered back boldly enough: "We have many factories. We have many men. You have won battles against us, but you are far from winning your war. We will fight on. Even the Gitlerites have more sense than to yield to you."
"As a matter of fact, I recently spoke with the foreign minister of Deutschland," Atvar said. That Tosevite had also been too stubborn to yield until his empire was pounded flat, but Molotov did not have to know it.
The native looked intently at the fleetlord. "And what had he to say?" Since the SSSR and Deutschland were at war before the Race reached Tosev 3, it stood to reason that they had little reason to trust each other.
"We discussed the feasibility of Deutschland's
acknowledging the authority of the Emperor," Atvar answered. On speaking of his sovereign, he cast down his eyes for a moment. So did the interpreter.
"Emperor, you say? I want to be sure I understand you correctly," Molotov said. "Your — nation— is headed by a person who rules because he is a member of a family that has ruled for many years before him? Is that what you tell me?"
"Yes, that is correct," Atvar said, puzzled by the Tosevite's puzzlement. "Who else would rule an empire— the Empire— but the Emperor? The Tosevite named Stalin, I gather, is the emperor of your SSSR."
So far as the fleetlord could see, Molotov still did not change expression. Nor was his voice anything but its usual mushy monotone. But what he said made the interpreter hiss in rage and astonishment, and even lash his tail
stump back and forth as if in mortal combat. The officer mastered himself, spoke in Molotov's language. Molotov answered. The interpreter trembled. Slowly, he mastered himself. Even more slowly, he turned to Atvar.
He still hesitated to speak. "What does the Big Ugly say?" Atvar demanded.
"Exalted Fleetlord," the interpreter stammered, "this— this thing of a Tosevite tells me to tell you that the people— the people of his SSSR— that they, they executed— murdered— their emperor and all his family twenty-five years ago. That would be about fifty of our years," he added, remembering his function as translator. "They murdered their emperor, and this Stalin, this leader of theirs, is no emperor at all, but the chief of the group of bandits that killed him"
Atvar was a mature, disciplined male, so he did not show his feelings with a hiss as the
interpreter had. But he was shocked to the very core of his being. Imagining a government without an emperor at its head was almost beyond him. Home had been unified for scores of millennia, and even in the distant days before unity bad seen only the struggle between one empire and another. Halless 1 was a single empire when the Race conquered it; Rabotev 2 had been divided, but also among competing empires. What other way was there to organize intelligent beings? The fleetlord could conceive of none.
Molotov said, "You should know, invader from another world, that Deutschland has no emperor either, nor does the United—" The interpreter went back and forth with him for a little-while, then explained, "He means the empire— or not-empire, I should say— in the northern part of the small landmass."
"These Tosevites are utterly mad," Atvar burst out. He added, "You need not translate that.
But they are. By the Emperor"—just saying the name was a comfort—"it must have to do with the world's beastly climate and excess water."
"Yes, Exalted Fleetlord," the interpreter said. "It may be so. But what shall I tell the creature here?"
"I don't know." Atvar felt befouled at even contemplating speech with anyone, no matter how alien, who was involved in impericide— a crime whose existence he had not thought of until this moment. All at once, cratering the whole world of Tosev 3 with nuclear weapons looked much more attractive than it had. But the fleet had only a limited number of them— against the sort of fight the Tosevites were expected to put up, even a few would have been more than necessary. And with Tosev 3's land surface so limited, ruining any of it went against his grain.
He gathered himself. "Tell this Molotov that what he and his bandits did before the Race arrived will not concern us unless they refuse to yield and thereby force us to take notice of it. But if need be, we will avenge their murdered emperor." Thinking of a murdered emperor, the fleetlord knew the first pity he'd felt for any Tosevite.
If his threat frightened Molotov, the Big Ugly gave no sign of it; the native truly was as frozen of countenance as anyone of the Race. He said, "It is true, then, that when you speak of an empire, you mean it in the exact and literal sense of the word, with an emperor and a court and all the trappings of the outworn past?"
"Of course that is true," Atvar answered. "How else would we mean it?"
"The enlightened people of the SSSR have cast the rule of despots onto the ash-heap of
history," Molotov said.
Atvar laughed in his flat face. "The Race has flourished under its Emperors for a hundred thousand years. What do you know of history, when you were savages the last time we looked over your miserable pest-hole of a planet?" The fleetlord heartily wished the Tosevites had stayed savages, too.
"History may be slow, but it is certain," Molotov said stubbornly. "One day the inevitable revolution will come to your people, too, when their economic conditions dictate its necessity. I think that day will be soon. You are imperialists, and imperialism is the last phase of capitalism, as Marx and Lenin have shown."
The interpreter stumbled through the translation of that last sentence, and added, "I have trouble rendering the natives' religious terms into our language, Exalted Fleetlord.
Marx and Lenin are gods or prophets in the SSSR." He spoke briefly with Molotov, then said, "Prophets. Vyacheslav Mikhailovich knew this Lenin himself."
Molotov said, "Lenin led the revolution which overthrew our emperor and established the rule of the people and workers of the SSSR. I am proud to say I assisted in this worthy task."
Atvar stared at the Tosevite in disgust. He spoke to the interpreter: "Tell the bandit I have nothing further to say to him. If he and his murderers will not yield themselves to us, their punishment shall only be the harsher."
The interpreter slowly, haltingly, turned the crisp words into the mushy native language. Molotov answered with one word. "Nyet"The fleetlord glanced with one quick flick of an eye at the interpreter to see if that meant what he thought. It did.
"Get him off this ship," Atvar snapped. "I am sorry he comes here under truce, or I would treat him as he deserves." The idea of wantonly slaughtering an emperor— even a Tosevite emperor— gave him an atavistic urge to bite something: Molotov by choice, though the Big Ugly looked anything but appetizing.
The doorway out of Atvar's office hissed open. The interpre
ter pushed off from the chair whose back he'd been holding and shot through it. Molotov followed more awkwardly, the graceless garments he wore flapping about him. As soon as he was gone, Atvar shut the door behind him. The rather sharp smell of his body remained, like a bad memory. The fleetlord turned up the air scrubbers to make it go away.
While it still lingered, he phoned Kirel. When the shiplord's face appeared in his screen, he said, "You will come to my quarters
immediately."
"It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord." Kirel blanked the screen. He was as good as his word. When he chimed for admittance, Atvar let him in, then closed the door again. Kirel asked, "How fare the talks with the Tosevites, Exalted Fleetlord?"