Upsetting the Balance w-3

by Harry Turtledove

  Before she separated from the rest, Rachel Hines said, “Thanks for not making me stay back with the critters, Captain.”

  Auerbach realized he hadn’t even thought of that. He’d accepted her as a soldier like any other. He shook his head. Would he have imagined such a thing before the war? Never in a million years.

  He strode across the chilly ground. These had probably been wheatfields before the Lizards came, but they didn’t look to have been harvested the last couple of years. Even after the winter die-off, a lot of the brush was waist high. Bushes had taken root here and there among the grain, too. The country looked pretty flat, but it gave better cover than you’d think. The grain and bushes also broke up the snow on the ground, making it harder to spot somebody’s tracks.

  If Larssen was smart, he’d just sit tight wherever he was and hope they’d miss him-if he was really here. But being that smart wasn’t easy-and if Auerbach turned the whole company loose on this stretch of ground, anybody hiding would get found.

  He didn’t want to do that, in case he was wrong. Pulling in a raft of men would leave a hole in the screen the Army had set up to keep the fugitive from slipping east “Larssen!” Auerbach shouted. “Come out with your hands up and nobody’ll get hurt. Make it easy on yourself.”Make it easy on us, too.

  Larssen didn’t come out. Auerbach hadn’t expected that he would. He took another couple of steps toward where Rachel and Smitty had seen whoever it was take cover. A bullet cracked past his ear. An instant later, he heard the sound of the gunshot. He was already throwing himself flat.

  “Down!” he yelled from behind a tumbleweed. He looked around, but dead plants didn’t let him see far. He shouted orders: “Spread out to right and left and take him.” Now they knew where Larssen was. Getting him out wouldn’t be any fun, but it was something they knew how to do, tactics that came almost as automatically as breathing.

  Larssen fired again, not at Auerbach this time. “You’re all against me,” he shouted, his voice thin in the distance. “I paid back two. I’ll pay back the rest of you sons of bitches if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

  Out on either flank, a couple of Auerbach’s troopers started shooting at Larssen, not necessarily to hit him but to make him keep his head down while their buddies slid forward. Not far from Auerbach, Rachel Hines fired a couple of shots. That was his cue to dash ahead and then flop down in back of another bush. He squeezed off three rounds from his own M-l, and heard Rachel and a couple of other troopers advancing on either side of him.

  If you were being moved in on from the front and both flanks the way Larssen was, you had only two choices, both bad. You could stay where you were-and get nailed-or you could try and run-and get nailed.

  Larssen sat tight. A cry from off to Auerbach’s left said he’d hit somebody. Auerbach bit his lip. Casualties came with the job. He understood that. When you went up against the Lizards, you expected not to come back with a full complement, and hoped you’d do them enough damage to make up for your own losses. But having somebody wounded-Auerbach hoped the trooper was just wounded-hunting down one guy who’d gone off the deep end… that was a waste, nothing else but.

  He was within a hundred yards of Larssen now, and could hear him even when he was talking to himself. Something about his wife and a ballplayer-Auerbach couldn’t quite make out what. He fired again. Rachel Hines scurried past him. Larssen rose up, shot, flopped back down. Rachel let out a short, sharp shriek.

  Larssen bounced to his feet. “Barbara?” he shouted. “Honey?”

  Auerbach fired at him. Several other shots rang out at the same instant Larssen reeled backwards, collapsed bonelessly. His rifle fell to the ground. He wasn’t going anywhere, not any time soon. Auerbach ran up to Rachel Hines. She already had a wound dressing out, and was wrapping it around her hand.

  She looked up at Auerbach. “Clipped the last two joints right off my ring finger,” she said matter-of-factly. “Don’t know what I’ll do about a wedding band if I ever get married.”

  “You’ll figure out something.” Auerbach bent down and kissed her on the cheek. He’d never done that for a wounded noncom before. Seeing that she wasn’t seriously injured, he said, “I’m going to make sure of the son of a gun now. I think maybe hearing you yell like that startled him into breaking cover.”

  “It’s not like I done it on purpose,” she answered, but she was talking to his back.

  Jens Larssen was still twitching when Auerbach got up to him, but he didn’t see any point in calling for a corpsman. Larssen had taken one in the chest, one in the belly, and one in the side of the face. He wasn’t pretty and he was dead, only his body didn’t quite know it yet. As Auerbach stood over him, he let out a bubbling sigh and quit breathing.

  “Well, that’s that,” Auerbach said, bending to pick up Larssen’s Springfield-no point in leaving a good weapon out to rust. “Now we can get on with the important stuff, like fighting the war.”

  TheNaxos chugged on toward Rome. It flew a large red-white-and-blue tricolor Captain Mavrogordato had hauled out of the flag locker. “I want the Lizards’ airplanes to think we are French,” he explained to Moishe. “We have friends on the ground in Rome who know we are bringing them good things, but the pilots-who can say what they know? Since the Lizards hold southern France, this will help them believe we are perfectly safe.”

  “What happens when we leave Rome and head for Athens and Tarsus and Haifa?” Moishe asked. “Those places, they won’t be so happy to see a ship that might have come out of Lizard-held country.”

  Mavrogordato shrugged. “We have plenty of flags in the locker. When the time comes, we will pick another one that better suits our business there.”

  “All right,” Russie said. “Why not?” He’d never known such a blithe swashbuckler before. Mavrogordato was smuggling things to the Lizards, undoubtedly smuggling things away from them, and was smuggling him and his family right past their scaly snouts. For all the Greek captain worried about it-airplanes aside-he might have had the whole Mediterranean to himself.

  “But what if something goes wrong?” Moishe had asked him, some hundreds of kilometers back toward the west. He himself was a chronic worrier, and was also of the opinion that, considering everything that had happened to him over the past few years, he’d earned the right.

  But Mavrogordato had shrugged then, too. “If something goes wrong, I’ll deal with it,” he’d answered, and that was all he would say. Moishe reluctantly concluded he didn’t say any more because he didn’t know any more. Moishe would have had plans upon plans upon plans, each one ready in case the trouble that matched it arrived.

  Whether the plans would have worked was another question. Given his track record, it wasn’t obvious. But he would have had them.

  “How far from Rome are we now?” he asked as the Italian countryside crawled past beyond the starboard rail.

  “Thirty-five kilometers, maybe a bit less,” Mavrogordato answered. “We’ll be there in a couple of hours-in time for lunch.” He laughed.

  Moishe’s stomach rumbled in anticipation. Neither the British freighter that had brought him down near Spain nor theSeanymph had had a galley that could compare to theNaxos’. Mavrogordato’s crew might have been short on shaves and clean clothes and other evidence of spit and polish, but they lived better than British seamen imagined. Russie wondered if the English had some sort of requirement denying them as much pleasure as possible. Or maybe they were just a nation of bad cooks.

  “I hate to say it, but I wish the Germans were in Italy instead of the Lizards,” Moishe said. “It gives them too good a base for pushing north or east.”

  “They tried pushing east into Croatia last year, and got their snouts bloodied for them,” Mavrogordato said. “But you’re right. Anybody who looks at a map can tell you as much. Hold Italy down and you’re halfway toward holding down the whole Mediterranean.”

  “Mussolini didn’t have much luck with the whole Mediterranean,” Moishe said,
“but we can’t count on the Lizards’ being as incompetent as he was.”

  Captain Mavrogordato slapped him on the back, hard enough to stagger him. He spoke a couple of sentences in Greek before he remembered Russie didn’t know what he was talking about and shifted back to German: “We kicked the Italians right out of our country when they invaded us. The Nazis beat us, yes, but not those clowns.”

  The difference between the Italians and the Germans was that between inept tyrants and effective ones. Inept tyrants roused only contempt. No one was contemptuous of the Germans, the Russians, or the Lizards. You could hate them, but you had to fear them, too.

  Moishe said, “Ginger is the worst weakness the Lizards have, I think. A Lizard who gets a taste for ginger will-”

  He broke off, a flash of light from the north distracting him. He wondered what it could be-it was as bright as the sun. And no, it wasn’t just a flash-it went from white to orange to red, a fireball swelling fantastically with each moment he stood there watching.

  “Meter theou!”Panagiotis Mavrogordato exclaimed, and crossed himself. The gesture didn’t bother Russie; he wished he had one to match it. The captain of theNaxos went on, “Did they hit an oil tanker between us and Rome? You’d think we would have heard the airplanes, or something.”

  They did hear something just then, a roar that rocked Moishe harder than Mavrogordato’s slap on the back had a few minutes earlier. A great column of smoke, shot through with crimson flames, rose into the air. Moishe craned his neck to watch it climb.

  Slowly, softly, he said, “I don’t think that was anything between us and Rome, Captain. I think thatwas Rome.”

  For a moment, the Greek stared at him, blank incomprehension on his face. Then Mavrogordato crossed himself again, more violently than he had before. “Is it one of those terrible bombs?” he demanded in a hoarse whisper.

  “I don’t know,” Moishe said. “I’ve never seen one before. But I don’t know what else it could be, either. Only the one blast and-that.” He nodded toward the glowing, growing cloud of dust and fire. “If God is kind, I’ll never see such a thing again.”

  Captain Mavrogordato pointed out over the water. A large wave was approaching theNaxos at unnatural speed, as if flying through the air rather than being part of the sea. The freighter’s bow rose sharply, then plunged into the trough behind. The wave sped past them, out toward Corsica and Sardinia and Sicily. Moishe wondered if it would wash up against distant Gibraltar.

  Mavrogordato shouted orders in Greek. TheNaxos’ engine began to work harder, the deck thrummed under Moishe’s feet and thick clouds of black smoke rose from the stack. Those clouds, though, were misshapen dwarfs when set alongside the one still swelling above Rome. Moishe could not tear his eyes away from that terrible beauty. He wondered how many people-and how many Lizards-had perished in the blast.

  “There goes the Pope,” Mavrogordato said, one step ahead of him. “I’m no Catholic, but that’s a hell of a thing to do to him.”

  How the Poles would wail when the news reached them! And, if they could find a way, they’d blame it on the Jews. This time, though, the Lizards and the Nazis looked to be much more likely candidates. Now, too, the Jews had guns (Moishe wondered briefly bow Mordechai Anielewicz fared these days). If the Poles started trouble, they’d get trouble back.

  The bow of theNaxos began swinging away from what had been its destination. Russie glanced toward Mavrogordato, a question in his eyes. The merchant captain said, “Nobody’s going to take delivery of what we were bringing, not here, not now. I want to get as far away as I can, as fast as I can. If the Lizards were hunting ships before, what will they do after this?”

  “Gevalt!”Moishe said; he hadn’t thought of that.

  Maybe the Greek had heard that bit of Yiddish before, or maybe tone and context let him figure out what it meant. He said, “It’ll be better once we get away from Italy; Lizard planes don’t range quite so widely in the eastern half of the Mediterranean as they do here. Only trouble is, I’m going to have to coal once before we make Athens. I would have done it at Rome, but now-”

  “Will they let you go into an Italian port after this?” Moishe asked.

  “Only one way to find out,” Mavrogordato answered, “and that’s to try it. I know some people-and some Lizards-in Naples. I could unload the ginger there,theou thelontos, and take on the fuel I need to get you to where you’re going. All we have to worry about is getting sunk before we make it that far. Well, friend, did you want life to be dull?”

  “What difference does it make?” Moishe said. “Life hasn’t cared what I want ever since the war started.” After a moment’s thought, the Greek solemnly nodded.

  Like all the other landcruiser drivers at the Siberian base, Ussmak had installed grids of electrically heated wire over his vision slits. They melted the frozen water that accumulated on the slits and let him see what he was doing. Nejas had mounted similar grids over the panoramic periscopes in the cupola. The local mechanics had slapped white paint on the landcruiser, too, to make it less visible as it ranged across the icy landscape.

  Ussmak let his mouth fall slightly open in a bitter laugh. Making the landcruiser less visible was a long way from making it invisible. The Big Uglies might not realize it was there quite so soon as they would have otherwise, but they’d get the idea too quickly to suit him any which way.

  “Steer a couple of hundredths closer to due south, driver,” Nejas said.

  “It shall be done.” Ussmak adjusted his course. Along with two others, his landcruiser was rumbling down to smash a Soviet convoy trying to cross from one end of the break in their railroad to the other. The Russkis had probably hoped to get away with it while camouflaged by the usual Siberian blizzards, but a spell of good weather had betrayed them. Now they would pay.

  Clear weather,Ussmak corrected himself.Not goodweather. From what the males unlucky enough to be longtimers at the base said, good weather in Siberia was measured in moments each long Tosevite year.

  “Let’s slaughter them and get back to the barracks,” Ussmak said. “The faster we do that, the happier I’ll be.” He was warm enough inside the landcruiser, but the machine was buttoned up at the moment, too. If the action got heavy, Nejas, good landcruiser commander that he was, would open up the cupola and look around-and all that lovely heat would get sucked right out All the crewmales had on their cold-weather gear in case of that dreadful eventuality.

  Wham!Ussmak felt as if he’d been kicked in the side of the head. The round from the Soviet landcruiser hadn’t penetrated the side armor of his own machine, but it did make the inside of the land-cruiser ring like a bell.

  “Turn toward it!” Nejas shouted, flipping the cupola lid. Ussmak was already steering his landcruiser to the left-you wanted to meet enemy fire head on, to present your thickest armor to the gun. He knew they’d been lucky. Soviet landcruiser cannon could pierce some spots in the side armor.

  He peered through his defrosted vision slits. It was already getting cold inside the landcruiser. Where among the dark, snow-draped trees and drifts of frozen water was the enemy lurking? He couldn’t spot the Big Uglies, not till they fired again. This time the round hit one of the other landcruisers, but did no damage Ussmak saw.

  “Front!” Nejas sang out.

  “Identified,” Skoob answered.

  But instead of smoothly going on with the target-identifying routine, Nejas made a strange, wet noise. “Superior sir!” Skoob cried, and then, in anguish, “Sniper! A sniper killed the commander!”

  “No,” Ussmak whispered. Votal, his first landcruiser commander, had died that way. A good commander kept standing up in the cupola, which let him see much more than he could through periscopes and made his landcruiser a far more effective fighting machine-but which also left him vulnerable to small-arms fire he could have ignored if he’d stayed snug inside the turret.

  As if the snow and ice themselves had come to malignant life, a figure all clad in white stood up
not far from the landcruiser and ran toward it “Bandit!” Ussmak shouted to Skoob, and snatched for his personal weapon.

  Skoob fired, but by then the camouflaged Big Ugly was too close to the landcruiser for its turret-mounted machine gun to bear on him. He tossed a grenade up and through the open cupola. It exploded inside the turret Ussmak thought he was dead. Fragments of the grenade ricocheted off the inside of the fighting compartment. One scraped his side; another tore a long, shallow cut across his right forearm. Only as he felt those small wounds did he realize the grenade somehow hadn’t touched off the ammunition inside the turret. If it had, he never would have had the chance to worry about cuts and scrapes.

  He shoved the muzzle of his personal weapon out through a firing port and sprayed the Big Ugly with bullets before he could chuck another grenade into the landcruiser. Skoob was screaming: terrible cries that grated on Ussmak’s hearing diaphragms. He couldn’t help the gunner, not yet. First he had to get away from the fighting.

  With one male in the turret dead and the other disabled, the land-cruiser was no longer a fighting machine. Ussmak could operate the gun or he could drive the vehicle. He couldn’t do both at once. He put it into reverse, moving away from the Soviet landcruisers in the forest.

  The audio button taped to a hearing diaphragm yelled at him: “What are you doing?” The cry came from the male who commanded one of the other landcruisers. “Have your brains addled?”

  “No, superior sir,” Ussmak said, though he wished for ginger to make the answer yes. In three or four short sentences, he explained what had happened to his landcruiser and its crew.

  “Oh,” the other commander said when he was through. “Yes, you have permission to withdraw. Good luck. Return to base; get your gunner to treatment as soon as possible.”

  “It shall be done,” Ussmak said, above Skoob’s wails and hisses. He would have withdrawn with or without orders. Had the other commander tried ordering him to stay, he might have gone up into the turret and put a round through his landcruiser. Keeping a crewmale alive counted for more than killing Big Uglies. You could do that any time. If your crewmale died, you’d never get him back.