by neetha Napew
But luck was not with Xarol. He did manage to keep his killercraft airborne until the flight reached territory the Race controlled. Gefron had just radioed the nearest landing strip of his wingmale's predicament when Xarol announced, "I regret, superior sir, that I have no choice but to abandon the aircraft."
Moments later, a blue-white fireball marked the machine's impact point.
When Gefron landed back at Warsaw, he learned his wingmale had ejected safely and been rescued. That pleased him— but the next time Xarol needed to fly, what aircraft would he use?
Small-arms fire rattled through Naperville. Mutt Daniels crouched in the trench in front of the ruins of the Preemption House. Every so often, when the firing slackened, he'd stick his tommy gun up over the forward rim of the trench, squeeze off a short burst in the direction of the Lizards, and then yank it back down again.
"Kinda quiet today, isn't it, Sarge?" Kevin Donlan said just as one such burst was answered by a storm of fire from the aliens,
whose forward outposts were only a few hundred yards to the east.
Mutt pressed his face against the dirt wall of the trench as bullets whined just overhead. "You call this here quiet?" he said, thinking he'd chill the kid with sarcasm.
But Donlan wouldn't chill. "Yeah, Sarge. I mean, it is, isn't it. Just rifle fire right now— just rifle fire all day long, pretty much. I don't miss the artillery one little bit, let me tell you."
"Me neither. Rifles are bad enough, but that other stuff, that's what slaughters you." Daniels paused, played back the day's action in his head. "You know, you're right, and I didn't even notice. They ain't done much with their big guns today, have they?"
"I didn't think so. What do you suppose it means?"
"Damfino." Mutt wished he had a cigarette or a chew or even a pipe. "I ain't sorry not to be on,this end of it either, though; don't get me wrong about that. But why they're off with it... son, I couldn't begin to tell you."
The more he thought about it, the more it worried him. The Lizards didn't have numbers going for them; their strength had always lain in their guns: their tanks and self-propelled pieces; if they were easing off with those...
"Maybe our offensive really is putting the screws to them, making them pull back," Donlan said.
"Mebbe." Daniels remained unconvinced. He'd been falling back before the invaders ever since he got strafed out. of his train. The idea that other troops could move forward against them was galling; it seemed to say nothing he'd done, nothing Sergeant Schneicier— as fine a soldier as ever lived—
had done, was good enough. He didn't like believing that.
Behind him, back toward Chicago, an American artillery barrage opened up on the Lizard position. It was an odd, pawky sort of shelling, on again, off again, nothing like the endless rains of projectiles that had punctuated combat in France. If you kept a gun in the same place for more than two or three rounds, the Lizards would figure out where it was and blast it. Mutt didn't know how they did it, but he knew they did. He'd seen too many dead artillerymen and wrecked guns to have any doubt left.
He waited for counterbattery fire to start. With the cynical senst of self-preservation soldiers soon develop, he would sooner have had the Lizards shelling positions miles behind him than lobbing their presents into his trench.
American shells kept falling on the Lizards.
When half an hour went by without reply, Daniels said, "You know, kid, you might just be right. Feels mighty damn good to give it to 'em instead of taking it, don't you reckon?"
"Hell yes, Sergeant," Donlan said happily.
A runner came down heavily into the trench where the two men sheltered. He said, "Check your watches, Sergeant, soldier. We're advancing against their lines in"— he glanced at his own watch—"nineteen minutes." He ran down the trench toward the next knot of men. "You got a watch?" Donlan asked.
"Yeah," Mutt answered absently. Advancing against the Lizards! He hadn't heard orders like that since outside Shabbona, halfway across the state. That had been a disaster. This time, though... "Maybe we really are hurting 'em out there. God damn, I hope we are." "
General Ration's personal vehicle was a big, ungainly Dodge command and reconnaissance car, one of the kind that had been nicknamed jeeps until the squarish little Willys vehicles took the name away from them. This one had been altered with a .50 caliber machine-gun mount that let Patton blaze away as well as command.
To Jens Larssen, who munched on crackers in the backseat and tried to stay inconspicuous, the gun seemed excessive. No one had asked his opinion. As far as he could see, no one ever asked anyone's opinion in the Army. You either gave orders or you went out and did what you were told.
Patton turned to him and said, "I do regret that you were thrust into the front line, Dr. Larssen. You bear too much value to your country for you to have been so cavalierly risked."
"It's all right," Larssen said. "I lived through it." Somehow, he added to himself. "Where are we now, anyhow?"
"D'you see that hill there, the one with the tall building sprouting from it?" Patton asked, pointing through the Dodge jeep's windshield. On the flat prairie country of central Illinois, any rise, no matter how slight, stood out. Patton went on, "The building is the State Farm Insurance headquarters, and the town"-he paused for dramatic effect—"the town, Dr. Larssen, is Bloomington."
"The objective." Larssen hoped General Patton would not take offense at the surprise in his voice. The Lizards had seemed so nearly invincible ever since they came to Earth. He hadn't dared believe Patton could not only force a breakthrough but exploit it once made.
"The objective," Patton agreed proudly. As if
answering the thought Jens hadn't spoken, he added, "Once we broke through their crust, they were hollow behind it. No doubt we were confused and scared, attacking such a formidable foe. But they showed confusion and fright themselves, sir, not least because they were being attacked."
The bulky radio console set into the space behind the rear seat of the Dodge jeep let out a squawk. Patton grabbed for the earphones and mike. He listened for a minute or so, then softly breathed one word: "Outstanding." He stowed the radio gear, gave his attention back to Larssen: "Our scouts, sir, have met advance parties from General Bradley's army north of Bloomington. We now have the force which was attacking Chicago trapped within our ring of steel."
"That's—wonderful," Larssen said. "But will they stay trapped?"
"A legitimate question," Patton said. "We will learn soon: reports indicated that the armor they had been using to spearhead their advance into Chicago has now reversed its direction."
"It's bearing down on us?" Jens felt some of the bladder-loosening fear he'd known while diverting the Lizard tank so the fellow with the bazooka could stalk and kill it. He remembered the gaggle of American tanks the monster had taken out, and the wrecked fighting vehicles that littered the snowy plains of Indiana and Illinois. If lots of those tanks were heading this way, how was Second Armor supposed to stop them?
Patton said, "I understand your concern, Dr. Larssen, but fighting aggressively while holding the strategic defensive should let us inflict heavy losses on them. And infantry teams firing antitank rockets from ambush will present a challenge they have not previously
experienced,"
"I sure hope so," Larssen said. He went on, "If they're coming from Chicago, sir, when will I be able to go into the city to find out what's become of the Metallurgical Laboratory?" And even more important, what's become of Barbara, he thought. But he'd learned he was more likely to get what he wanted from Patton by leaving personal concerns out of the equation.
"As soon as we have destroyed the Lizard tank forces, of course," Patton said grandly. "We'll do to them what Rommel did to the British time and again in the desert: make them charge down lines of fire we'll already have preregistered. Not only that, our forces farther east have gone over to the attack and are pursuing them out of Chicago. It should be a slaughter."
> Of whom? Jens wondered. The Lizard tanks were not the slow, balky, unreliable machines England used. Would any defenses be enough to hold them back when they wanted to go somewhere?
As if to underscore his concern, half a mile ahead a helicopter skimmed low over the ground like a mechanized shark. A rocket lanced out to obliterate an American halftrack and however many men it was carrying. Patton swore and started hammering away with his heavy machine gun. The noise was overpowering, like standing next to a triphammer. Tracers showed he was scoring hits, but the tough machine ignored them.
Then, without warning, something heavier than a .50 caliber slug must have hit it. It heeled awkwardly in the air; Patton almost shot off his driver's ear as he tried to keep a bead on it. The helicopter scurried away, back toward the west where the Lizards still held
the countryside.
Maybe another shell found it then. Maybe the cumulative damage from all the bullets Patton and every other American in range poured into it took a toll. Or maybe the Lizard pilot, fleeing under heavy fire, just made a mistake. The helicopter's rotor clipped a tree. The machine did a twisting somersault straight into the ground.
Patton yelled like a madman. So did Jens and the jeep driver. Patton pounded the physicist on the back. "Do you see, Dr. Larssen? Do you see?" he shouted. "They're not invulnerable, not even slightly."
"So they're not," Jens admitted. Lizard tanks, though, carried more firepower and more armor than their helicopters. They might not be invulnerable, but they sure had seemed close to it until that crazy bazooka thing took one out. Even then, the rocket round hadn't
wrecked it with a frontal hit, but with one to the less heavily protected engine compartment.
"Yes, sir, Larssen, it won't be long before you can head into Chicago as a conqueror," Patton boomed. "If you're going to do, by God, do it with style!"
Jens didn't care anything about style. He would gladly have gone into Chicago naked and in blackface if that was the only way to get there. And if Patton insisted on holding him away much longer, he'd damn well take French leave and head into town on his own. Why not? he thought. It's not like I'm really a soldier.
Atvar increased the magnification on the situation map. The Race's movements appeared in red arrows, those of the Big Uglies in rather fuzzier white ones that
reflected the uncertainties of reconnaissance. The fleetlord hissed in discontent. "I don't know whether we're going to be able to extricate our forces there or not."
Kirel peered at the situation map, too. "This is the pocket in which the Tosevites on the lesser continental map have trapped our assault units, Exalted Fleetlord?"
"Yes," Atvar said. "They have taught us a lesson here: never be so concerned about the point of an attack as to neglect the flanks."
"Indeed." Kirel left one eye on the map, turned the other toward Atvar. "Forgive me, Exalted Fleetlord, but I had not looked for you to be so, ah, sanguine over our misfortunes in the, ah, not-empire called the United States."
"You mistake me, Shiplord," Atvar said sharply, and Kirel lowered his eyes in apology. Atvar went on, "I do not enjoy seeing our brave
males endangered by the Big Uglies under any circumstances. Moreover, I have hope we shall still be able to get many of them out. If the beastly weather would let up, our aircraft ought to be able to blast an escape corridor through which we could conduct our retreat. Failing that, the landcruisers will have to do the job."
"Landcruiser losses have been unusually heavy in this action," Kirel said.
"I know." That did pain Atvar; without those landcruisers, his ground-based forces were going to have ever more trouble conducting needed operations. He said, "The Big Uglies have come up with something new again."
"So they have." The disgust with which Kirel freighted his words made it sound as if he were cursing the Tosevites for their ingenuity. The Race had had plenty of cause to do that; had the Big Uglies been less fiendishly
ingenious, all of Tosev 3 would long since have been incorporated into the Empire.
Atvar said, "As with most of their innovations, we will need a certain amount of time to develop appropriate countermeasures." They should be in place about the time the Big Uglies invent their next new weapon, he thought. And of course, they won't work against that. Aloud, he continued, "Still, considering how different this world is from what our probe predicted, we, should count ourselves lucky that we've not got our tailstumps pinched in the doorway more often."
"As you say, Exalted Fleetlord." But Kirel sounded anything but convinced.
Atvar let his mouth fall open. "In case you're wondering, Shiplord, I've not started tasting ginger; I don't suffer from the insane self-confidence the drug induces. I have reason for
being sanguine, as you termed it. Observe."
He poked a control with a claw. The situation map vanished from the screen, to be replaced by images from a killercraft's gun cameras. On the screen, bombs arced down into drifting, blowing smoke. Moments later, fireballs and more smoke mushroomed into the sky. The angle of the tape-jerked sharply as the killercraft dodged through desperate Tosevite efforts to shoot it down.
"That, Shiplord," Atvar declared, "is a Tosevite petroleum refinery going up in flames. It happens to be the one that supplies Deutschland, but we have struck several in recent days. If we continue on that pattern, the embarrassments we have suffered around this town of Chicago should soon fade into insignificance as the Big Uglies run low on fuel."
"How massive is this destruction when
compared to the overall production of the facility?" Kirel asked.
Atvar replayed the tape. He enjoyed watching the enemy's petroleum stocks going up in flames. "Do the images not speak for themselves? Smoke has shrouded this, ah, Ploesti place ever since our attack, which means the Big Uglies have yet to suppress the blazes we started."
"But there was smoke around the facility before," Kirel persisted. "Is this not part of the Tosevites' ongoing camouflage efforts?"
"Infrared imaging indicates otherwise," Atvar said. "Some of these hot spots have remained in place since our bombs ignited them."
"That is good news," Kirel admitted.
"It is the best possible news, and the story at other refineries is similar," the fleetlord said.
"They have gone down to destruction more easily even than I anticipated when I began this series of strikes against them. The war for Tosev 3 may have hung in the balance up until this time, but now we are tilting the balance decisively in our favor."
"May it be so." Ever cautious, Kirel accepted nothing new until it was proved overwhelmingly. "The future of the Race here depends on its being so. The colony ships are behind us, after all."
"So they are." Atvar played the tape, of the burning refinery yet again. "We shall be ready for them, by the Emperor." He cast his eyes to the floor in reverence for his sovereign. So did Kirel.
* * *
George Patton aimed the jeep's machine gun up in the air, squeezed the triggers. As the
gun roared, he tried to outyell it. After a few seconds, he stopped firing and turned to Jens Larssen. He pummeled the physicist with his fists. "We've done it, by God!" he bawled. "We've held the sons of bitches."
"We really have, haven't we?" Larssen knew he sounded more amazed than overjoyed, but he couldn't help it— that was how he felt.
Patton didn't get angry; nothing, Jens thought, would have angered Patton this morning. He said, "This is the greatest victory in the war against the Lizards." (It was also, for all practical purposes, the first and only victory in the war against the alien invaders, but Jens didn't want to cut into Patton's ebullience by pointing that out.) "Now that we know it can be done and how to do it, we'll beat them again and again."
If confidence had anything to do with anything, Patton would, too. He looked as if he'd just
stepped off a recruiting poster. His chin, as usual, was naked of stubble, his uniform clean, his boots shiny. He smelled of Ivory soap and aft
ershave.
How he managed that right through a hard-driving campaign was beyond Larssen, whose own face was like a wire brush, whose splotched and spotted overcoat (he devoutly hoped) helped camouflage him, and whose shoes had broken laces and no finish whatsoever. Patton insisted spruced-up soldiers had better morale. Seeing the spruced-up Patton beside him only reminded Jens how grubby he was himself.
But victory kicked morale harder and higher than mere cleanliness ever could. Larssen said, "It's a damn shame any of the Lizards broke out."
"It is indeed," Patton said. "I console myself by remembering that perfection is an attribute
belonging only to God. This consolation comes easier because we closed off the breakout after the tanks punched through. Few foot soldiers managed to follow them." He pointed to a burnt-out Lizard tank not far away. "And more of their armor ended up like that."