Upsetting the Balance (38 page)

“That’s not the worst of it, either,” Atvar said. “Flying transports over Britain gets riskier by the day. Not only do the British seem to keep pulling aircraft out from under flat stones, but the Deutsche in northern France strike at our machines as they fly back and forth to Britain. We have lost several transports, and cannot afford to lose many more.”

“Truth,” Kirel repeated glumly.

“If we have to start using starships instead, and if we start losing starships in significant numbers—” Atvar didn’t go on. He didn’t need to go on. If the Race started losing starships in significant numbers, the war against the Big Uglies would be within shouting distance of being lost along with them.

“What then is our course in regard to the northern pocket in Britain, Exalted Fleetlord?” Kirel asked.

Atvar hissed again. He heartily wished the northern pocket did not exist. If the British kept pounding on it, it wouldn’t exist much longer. That, however, was not what he’d had in mind as a means for disposing of it. Bitterly, he said, “If only the sweep around London to the west from the southern force hadn’t been halted at the river line, we could have withdrawn the males north of London without undue trouble.”

“Yes, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said dutifully. Although he had every right to, he didn’t remind Atvar that ifs like this had no place in military planning.

“Bringing the males out from the north would be feasible,” Atvar said, “but with the heavy transports having such difficulty there—with all manner of fixed-wing aircraft having such difficulty there—we would be compelled to leave behind a great deal of equipment.”

Not until the words had left his mouth did he realize he’d abandoned all hope of salvaging the northern pocket. The battle there was one the Race would lose, and he couldn’t do anything about it except make the defeat less costly.

He hoped Kirel would contradict him. He’d phrased his comment hypothetically; the shiplord might well find reason for optimism where he saw none. But Kirel said, “Exalted Fleetlord, if we stay in the pocket we shall lose not only the equipment but the males as well. We should do our best to deny the materiel to the British, lest it be turned against us.”

Now Atvar said, “Truth.” In a way, acknowledging defeat was liberating. In another way, it was terrifying. The fleetlord said, “If we withdraw from the northern pocket, the political consequences will be unpredictable but surely unfortunate.”

“They shouldn’t be as bad as that, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said, his voice soothing. “We will have kept the British from meddling on the main continental mass for some time to come, and other Tosevite empires opposing us can hardly be stimulated to more effort than they are already making.”

“Those were not the consequences to which I was referring,” Atvar answered. “I was thinking of possible developments within the ranks of the shiplords themselves.”

“Ahh,” Kirel said. “Now I see.” He paused thoughtfully. “My view is that, with Straha gone, it will likely be too divisive an issue for any male to raise. His defecting to the Big Uglies has worked to your advantage, because it discredits in advance those who would rebel against your leadership.”

“Yes, I have made a similar calculation,” Atvar said. He carefully did not send Kirel a suspicious look. Straha had also been Kirel’s chief rival for leadership among the shiplords. Now Kirel had no chief rival among them. After only himself, Kirel was supreme. If he took it into his head to claw aside the fleetlord . . . Kirel hadn’t played that role when he’d had the chance, but then Straha had been the one calling for his head.

Kirel said, “As I mentioned before, we have met some of our goals for the invasion of Britain, if not all of them. We need not be ashamed of our efforts on the island.”

“No,” Atvar agreed. He let his mouth fall open and nodded slightly: a rueful laugh. “Anywhere in the Empire but Tosev 3, partial fulfillment of goals is a matter for shame and reproach. Here, against the Big Uglies, we feel like celebrating whenever we can accomplish that much.”

“More is relative than the behavior of objects at speeds approaching that of light,” Kirel said. “Among ourselves and when dealing with the Rabotevs and Hallessi, planning can take into account all known variables, and almost all variables are known. When we deal with the Big Uglies, almost all variables have indeterminate values.”

“Truth,” Atvar answered sadly. “Sometimes we don’t even know a variable exists until it rises up and bites off the tip of our tailstump. These poisonous gases, for instance: the Tosevites had them in unlimited quantity, but weren’t using them against each other or against us. For all we know, we may have overrun considerable stores of them without noticing—and the Big Uglies would hardly have gone out of their way to point them out to us.”

“There’s a notion, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “We should explore the weapons stocks in empires under our control. That may enable us to retaliate in kind against the Tosevites.”

“See to that,” Atvar said. “We will still be at a disadvantage against them, as their protection technology is ahead of ours”—he opened and closed his hands in embarrassment at the admission—“but having the tool in our kit will prove useful, as you say. Start the investigation today.”

“It shall be done,” Kirel said.

Atvar went on, “Whether or not we come upon stores of these gases, though, the point is that we were unaware the Tosevites even had them until we made the British desperate enough to use them against us.”

“With all too much success,” Kirel said.

“With all too much success,” Atvar agreed. “The Big Uglies care nothing for the long term. If something will help them for a moment, they seize on it. In the long run; their species may well have wrecked itself had we not come along at this particular time.” He hissed a sigh. “But come we did, and now we must make the best of it.”

“The Soviets’ use of the nuclear device was a similar phenomenon, I believe,” Kirel said. “When we press the Tosevites—or some of them, at any rate—they are liable to do astonishing things.”

“Astonishing, yes,” Atvar replied dryly. “To say nothing of appalling. And several of their other empires and not-empires are sure to be working on nuclear weapons for themselves. And if we press hard enough to make them desperate—” He paused.

“But if we don’t, Exalted Fleetlord, how are we to win the war?” Kirel said.

“Planners back on Home never have to worry about dilemmas like that,” Atvar said. “By the Emperor, bow I envy them!”

10

Ludmila Gorbunova was used to flying over the endless plains of the Ukraine and central Russia. She’d seen little of the great forests of pine and fir and beech and birch that blanketed the more northerly reaches of her country.

Around Pskov, trees dominated, not steppe. The great dark green expanse to the east had been called the forest republic when Soviet partisans used it as their base and stronghold against the Nazis who held the city. Now Russians and Germans both used the woods in their struggle against the Lizards.

The Lizards used them, too. Ludmila was still discovering one major difference between forest and steppe: out on the steppe, despite vigorous Soviet
maskirovka,
concealing soldiers and weapons and machines was hard work. Here in the woods, it was second nature.

An aircraft that flew low and slow like her little U-2 biplane was the only sort of machine with much of a chance to look down and see what the enemy was doing. As she buzzed along, she wished the
Kukuruznik
could also fly low and fast. A Lizard helicopter could run her down and shoot her out of the air with no trouble at all, if it chanced to notice her.

She skimmed over a path in the forest. On the path she spied a pair of lorries, pushing north. They were of human manufacture—one a German model, the other an American one probably captured from the Soviets—but where they were and the direction in which they were going declared them to be under Lizard control. And where she’d seen two, there were likely to be two dozen more she hadn’t seen, plus armored personnel carriers and tanks.

Ludmila had heard stories of Red Air Force pilots who’d flown below treetop height right down paths like that, shooting up everything in their sights. People who did things like that got the Hero of the Soviet Union award pinned on their tunics, sometimes by the Great Stalin himself. It was tempting, but . . .

“I’d only get myself killed,” Ludmila said, as if someone were in the
Kukuruznik
arguing with her. It wasn’t that she was afraid the Lizards would shoot her down; she’d signed up with the risk of getting shot down when she joined the Red Air Force. But she didn’t think the lane was wide enough to let her get the U-2 down it. Tearing the wings off your aircraft by running into a tree was not what they taught you in flight school.

That left her with one choice. She spun the little—but not little enough—biplane through a tight turn and headed back toward Pskov. The Germans had artillery that could pound this position and the area north of it. It wouldn’t be a guaranteed kill, not by any means, but it would make the Lizards unhappy.

Again she wished she could wring a better turn of speed from the Wheatcutter. The sooner she got back to Pskov, the shorter the distance the supply convoy would have traveled and the better the chance for a hit.

The tall stone pile of the
Krom
and the onion domes of the churches marked the town. The old citadel wasn’t badly damaged, but some of the domes had bites taken out of them and others leaned drunkenly away from the perpendicular. Some churches, along with a great many secular buildings, were in ruins.

Ludmila was a loyal child of the October Revolution, and had no great use for churches. Had the Soviet government knocked them down, she wouldn’t have missed them a bit. But to have them destroyed by invading aliens was something else again. Even the Nazis, albeit for reasons of their own, had usually refrained from wrecking churches.

Instead of using the airstrip to the east of Pskov, as she usually did, Ludmila brought the
Kukuruznik
down in the park in the middle of town, the way she had when she first came to the city. Again, she managed to keep from running over people or livestock. Men came running to get the U-2 under the shelter of friendly trees.

She scrambled out of the aircraft and hurried toward the
Krom,
where
Generalleutnant
Kurt Chill had his headquarters. Having a Nazi in overall command of the defenses of a Soviet city galled her, but she couldn’t do anything about it, not now. And if Chill didn’t fight hard against the Lizards, it was assuredly his backside, too.

People shouted to her, asking what she’d seen that made her want to land in the middle of Pskov. “I can’t tell you that,” she answered. Some of the Pskovites seemed never to have heard of security. Well, if they hadn’t, she certainly had.

She hurried over to the
Krom.
No sentries, Soviet or German, stood outside. Nobody wanted to give the Lizards a clue that anything important went on in there. Inside the entrance, a couple of tall Nazi soldiers leered at her. The Germans often found the idea of women in the fighting forces funny.
“Was willst du, Liebchen?”
one of them asked. His companion, a very rough-looking customer indeed, broke out in giggles.

“Ich will Generalleutnant Chill sofort zu sehen,”
Ludmila answered in the iciest German she could muster: “I want to see Lieutenant General Chill immediately.”

“Give me a kiss first,” the guard said, which made his comrade all but wet himself with mirth.

Ludmila drew her Tokarev automatic, pointing it not at the fellow’s head or chest but at his crotch. “Stop wasting my time,
dummkopf,”
she said sweetly. “If the Lizards get away on account of you, it won’t be my neck that goes into the noose.”

“Bitch,” muttered one of the Germans. “Dyke,” the other said under his breath. But both of them moved aside. Ludmila didn’t put the pistol back in its holster till she got round the corner.

Another German, a captain, sat at a desk in the antechamber outside Lieutenant General Chill’s office. He treated Ludmila like a soldier, but was no more helpful on account of that. “I am sorry, Senior Lieutenant, but he is away at the front,” the German said. “I do not expect him back for several days.”

“I need to have an artillery barrage laid on,” Ludmila said, and explained what she’d seen moving up the forest track from the south. The German captain frowned. “I have no authority to commit artillery to action except in immediate defense of the front,” he said doubtfully. “Using it is dangerous, because Lizard counterbattery fire so often costs us guns and men, neither of which we can afford to lose.”

“I risked my life to get this information and bring it back here,” Ludmila said. “Are you going to sit there and ignore it?” The captain looked too clean and much too well-fed to have seen the front lines lately, no matter where Lieutenant General Chill was.

Instead of blowing up at her, he said, “If the matter is as important as all that, Senior Lieutenant, I suggest you take it to the Englishmen down the hall.” He pointed out the direction. “In the absence of the commander, they have the power to bind and to loose.” He sounded like a man quoting something. If he was, Ludmila didn’t recognize it. He also sounded like a man unhappy about command arrangements. He didn’t need to be happy, though—he just had to obey. Germans were supposed to be good at that.

“Yes, I’ll try them, thank you,” Ludmila said, and hurried out.

All three of the Englishmen were in their map-bedecked office, along with a blond woman in Red Army uniform, a rifle with telescopic sight slung on her back. She was so decorative, Ludmila doubted at first that she had any right to the uniform and sniper’s weapon. A second glance at the woman’s eyes changed her mind. She’d seen enough action herself to recognize others who had done likewise.

One of the Englishmen—Jones—had his hand on her shoulder. She stood close to him, but she was watching the one called Bagnall, the one Ludmila had met in the park when she first came to Pskov. She felt as if she’d walked into something out of
Anna Karenina,
not a place where battles got planned.

But Ken Embry, the third Englishman, saw her and said,
“Chto—
What?” His Russian remained on the rudimentary side. Even so, he attracted the others’ attention to Ludmila. Jones jerked his hand away from the woman’s shoulder as if she’d suddenly become red-hot.

Best, probably, for Ludmila to pretend she hadn’t seen anything. What the Englishmen did in their private lives was their private business, although she wished they hadn’t brought their private lives with them to the
Krom.
In German interspersed with Russian, Ludmila explained what she’d seen and what she’d wanted. George Bagnall translated her words into English.

“Come to the map,” he said in German when he was done. He pointed to the forests south of Pskov. “Where exactly did you see these lorries, and how long ago?”

She studied the map. It made her slightly nervous; in the Soviet Union, maps were secret things, not to be shown to the generality. She pointed. “It was here, west of this pond. I am sure of it. And it was”—she glanced at the watch strapped to her left wrist—“twenty-three minutes ago. I came in to report as soon as I saw them.”

George Bagnall smiled at her. By Russian standards, his face was long, thin, and bony. He was not, to Ludmila’s way of thinking, a particularly handsome man, but that smile lit up his face. He said, “You did well to note the exact time, and to get back to Pskov so fast.”

After that, he dropped back into English to talk with his comrades. Ludmila, who had no English, at first thought that rude. Then she realized the RAF men had business to do and needed their own language for it. Her irritation faded.

Bagnall returned to the same mixture of German and Russian that Ludmila used: “By the time we can get the guns to open up, the lorries will be almost to the Lizards’ front line—do you see?” He drew their probable track up to the line south of Pskov marked in red ink. Seeing Ludmila’s disappointed expression, he went on, “But the Lizards may not be done unloading them. A few shells might do us some good. Wait here.”

He left the map chamber, returning a few minutes later with a different sort of smile on his face. “Captain Dölger does not approve of us, but he is a good soldier. If he is ordered to do something, it will get done.”

Sure enough, within a couple of minutes field guns off to the north and east of Pskov began hammering away in the short, intense bombardment that seemed best calculated to hit the Lizards. They shifted position before counterbattery fire could wreak full havoc.

And sure enough, Ludmila heard incoming rounds hard on the heels of the last outgoing ones. “I hope they managed to move their cannon,” she said, and then shook her head. “Hoping anything good for the Germans still feels wrong to me.” Saying that in German felt wrong to her, too. She repeated it in Russian.

The woman with the sniping rifle nodded emphatically. In fair Russian of his own, Jones, the youngest Englishman, said, “For us also. Remember, we were at war with the Hitlerites for almost two years before the Soviet Union joined that fight.”

Ludmila did remember. For those almost two years, in the Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany could do no wrong. It was dealing blow after blow to the imperialist powers . . . until it dealt a blow to the Soviet Union that almost wrecked it forever. Ludmila said, “They are our allies against the Lizards. I try to forget everything but that. I try—but it is not easy.”

“No, it is not easy,” George Bagnall said. “Things I’ve seen here, things I saw in France, make me glad we were dropping bombs on Jerry’s head. And yet the Nazis give the Lizards a thin time of it. Very strange.”

Most of that had been in German, but the blond Russian woman understood enough of it to say, “Nobody says the Nazis cannot fight. Or if anyone does say it, it is a lie; we have all seen enough to know better. But they do not think why they fight. Someone tells them what to do, and they do it well. And for what? For Hitlerism!” Her cornflower-blue eyes blazed contempt.

No one argued with her. A couple of minutes later, Captain Dölger came running into the room. His fleshy, handsome face glowed. “Field telephones from the front say our artillery touched off secondary explosions—some of those lorries were carrying shells.” Bagnall had told him what to do, and he’d done it well.

The blonde with the rifle threw her arms around Bagnall and kissed him on the mouth. Captain Dölger coughed; he left the Englishmen’s office as fast as he’d come in. Jerome Jones flushed till he looked like a boiled crayfish. Ludmila turned away, embarrassed. Such behavior by a Soviet woman was uncultured in the extreme.