Tilting the Balance w-2

by Harry Turtledove

  He realized he could see the silhouette of the soldier in front of him. A couple of paces later, he emerged in a dusty storeroom illuminated only by lights from other rooms, none of them especially close. All the same, after the tunnel it seemed almost noonday bright.

  “Spread out, spread out,” Skorzeny urged in a hissing whisper. “Give the men behind you room to get out.” When the whole force had emerged, Skorzeny thumped Jager on the back. “The colonel here, being an expert in archaeology, knows where the stairs are.”

  By now, the SS man-and several others among the raiders-had studied the underground maze enough to know it as well as Jager, if not better. He appreciated the nod even so: reminded the men that his word counted next after Skorzeny’s. He said, “I just don’t want to find a lot of Lizards down here. If we have to fight underground, we won’t get up the surface and sweep them off the walls.”

  “That’s what Petrovic’s diversion is for,” Skorzeny said: “to flush all of them up to the top so they won’t notice us till too late-for them.”

  Jager knew that was what the diversion was for. He also knew diversions weren’t always diverting enough to do what they were supposed to do. He kept quiet. They’d find out soon enough how well this one had worked.

  Skorzeny turned his attention to the group as a whole. “My advice is simple: shoot first.” He repeated the phrase in Italian and Serbo-Croatian. The men he led just grinned-they’d figured that one out for themselves. Skorzeny grinned, too. “Come on, you lugs.” As he’d been first into the tunnel, he was first out of the storeroom.

  Jager had never seen the underground maze of hallways and chambers in Diocletian’s palace, not till now. But he moved through it confidently, counting off turns under his breath as he trotted along. A blast of heat came from one big room he passed: the Lizard barracks. If ever the raiders would be discovered down here, this was the place.

  No shouts, no hisses, no gunfire. There ahead were the stone stairs. Skorzeny bounded up them three at a time. The rest of the men, Jager still near the front of the pack, ran at his heels. The panzer colonel’s stomach knotted. An eye turret turned at the wrong moment and the assault could still turn into a slaughter.

  Trying to match the Lizards’ swiveling eyes, his head twisted every which way as he reached the top of the stairs. The aliens were still banging away from the wall, but the bulk of the baptistry hid them from him-and him from them.

  Skorzeny used hand signals to divide the raiders into two groups and to show no one had better argue against Jager’s leading one of them. He pointed right and then forward to show Jager’s group was to go around the baptistry, then led his own group to the left.

  “Come on,” Jager hissed to his men. He trotted at their fore: if you wanted to impress anybody who’d already seen Skorzeny in action, you’d better lead from the front. Otherwise, your men wouldn’t follow you for long.

  He waved the group to a halt as they came to the corner of the baptistry. FG-42 at the ready, he stepped out into the narrow street that led north to the wall. As he did so, he heard Skorzeny’s group start firing.

  A Lizard a couple of hundred meters ahead whirled at that unexpected sound. It caught sight of Jager. Before it could bring up its rifle, he cut it down. “Forward!” he shouted, and ran up the street. The pound of boots on cobblestones behind him said he’d brought his troops with him.

  Personal weapon at the ready, Drefsab scrambled over a big gray stone and dropped down into the enclosed area of the castle of Klis. His feet scrunched on dry weeds. Several other males were already there, scurrying around and nervously checking anything that could hide a Big Ugly.

  Thus far, they’d found precisely nothing. Drefsab was disappointed-he wanted Skorzeny dead and proved dead. But sealing off this place and taking possession of it for the Race wasn’t bad in and of itself, either. High time to expand the foothold in Croatia beyond the town of Split, he thought.

  “They’ve been here,” a male said, pointing to the litter scattered wherever it wasn’t visible from Split. “Why aren’t they here now?” He sounded indignant; to the Race, the world by rights should have been a neatly predictable place.

  “They may have timed their attack in town to match ours here,” Drefsab answered. “Their intelligence is revoltingly good.” That didn’t surprise him overmuch; only natural for beings of one kind to stick together against those of another, especially when the latter were trying to conquer them.

  He badly wanted a taste of ginger. He’d all but promised the fleetlord that he’d bring back Skorzeny’s head in a clear block of acrylic resin. Would Atvar be content if presented with a mere strategic gain rather than said head? Unless Skorzeny got himself killed and identified back in Split, it looked as if Drefsab would have to find out. Ginger wouldn’t change that, but would keep him from having to think about it for a while.

  Another male waved to him from a stone-lined hole in the ground. “Over here, superior sir,” he said. “Looks like the Big Uglies that haunted this place made their home underground.”

  Drefsab shone an electric torch into the hole. Even without it, he would have been sure this was a Big Ugly den: the Tosevites’ rank, meaty smell filled the scent receptors on his tongue. He played the torch back and forth, then let out a low hiss. “This place will hold a lot of Big Uglies.”

  “That’s true, superior sir,” the male agreed. “Where do you suppose they’ve all gone?”

  “Some of them back to their villages, I suppose, and some into town to attack our walls,” Drefsab answered. He stuck out his tongue. The words did not taste right. From all he’d learned of Skorzeny, such a simpleminded frontal assault seemed out of character.

  “If you want us to set up camp in this pile of stones, superior sir I hope you don’t expect us to use that place down there.” The soldier also stuck out his tongue, and waggled it in derision and disgust. “It stinks.”

  “That it does,” Drefsab said. “And no, I promise you won’t have to set up your sleeping gear down there-not until we fumigate, anyhow.” His mouth and the other male’s dropped open in a laugh.

  The speaker built into his helmet suddenly screamed at him: “Superior sir! Superior sir! We’re under attack not just from outside the wall but also from within! Somehow a large party of Big Uglies managed to get inside the walls without being noticed. We’re taking heavy casualties. Need for assistance urgent in the extreme!”

  Drefsab made a noise like a pressure cooker forgotten on top of a hot stove. “None of them slipped away to their villages,” he said when coherent speech returned. The male beside him stared in confusion; he hadn’t heard the desperate call. Drefsab went on, “They all went down into Split.” No, Skorzeny wasn’t simpleminded at all.

  “Who? The Big Uglies?” the male asked, still trying to figure out what was going on.

  Drefsab ignored him. He waved to the soldiers scattered over the castle of Klis. “Back to the helicopters!” he shouted.

  “Quick as you can!”

  A virtue of the Race was obedience to superiors. The males neither hesitated nor asked questions. They ran toward the helicopters as fast as their legs would take them. Behind the armor-glass windscreens, the pilots waved frantically. They’d got, the message, too, then.

  Drefsab dashed up to the cockpit. “To the fortress!” he snarled. “Skorzeny will pay for this. Oh, how he will pay.”

  All the pilot said was, “It shall be done.” He pulled up on the collective. The helicopter sprang into the air. It wheeled within its own diameter and darted back toward Split. Only then did the pilot say, “May I ask your plan, superior sir?”

  “Use our firepower to blast the Big Uglies out of the fortress,” Drefsab answered. “They may have smuggled in men and rifles; I refuse to believe they could carry antiaircraft weapons into Split without our noticing.”

  “No doubt you are right about that, superior sir,” the weapons officer said with all proper deference. “But I see I must remind you that we e
xpended most of our munitions in the bombardment of that empty castle. We have little left to use back at the city.”

  Drefsab stared at him in blank dismay. After a moment, he said, “Keep going anyhow. I’ll think of something.” The ground blurred by under the helicopter. He didn’t have much time.

  Jager had fought house to house, street to street, in towns and cities in the Ukraine. He’d hated it then. Even with a panzer wrapped around him, it was deadly dangerous work. Doing it in nothing but these ragged clothes struck him as clinically insane. “You’d never get me to join the infantry now,” he muttered, sheltered in the doorway of a building near the wall. “I did that the last war.”

  Bullets sprayed past him, biting chips out of stone and brickwork. They stung when they hit; if you got one in the eye, it could blind you. The Lizards all had automatic weapons and, by the way they hosed fire around, they might have had all the ammunition in the world, too. Jager was too aware that he didn’t. The FG-42 was a wonderful weapon, but it went through magazines in a hurry.

  Several men in front of him shot back at the Lizards. That was the signal for him and half a dozen fellows with him to leapfrog forward past them. Leaving the doorway was as hard as getting out of a trench and springing across no-man’s-land had been in France a generation ago. But fire and move was how you fought as a foot soldier if you wanted any kind of chance of living to do it again.

  He bounded along the cobblestones, bent over as if his belly griped him to make himself as small a target for the Lizards as he could. The men firing hadn’t suppressed all the enemies ahead. Bullets struck sparks from the cobbles close by his feet and ricocheted away at crazy angles.

  He’d had a new doorway in mind when he started his dash. He threw himself into it, panting as if he’d just run a marathon rather than a few meters. A moment later, another fellow squeezed in behind him. In Slavic-accented German, he asked, “Think any of the things are inside here?”

  Jager made a sour face. “We’re getting up close to their position. It could be.”

  “I have grenade,” the Croat said, pulling a German potato-masher model from his belt. He tried a thick wooden door. The knob turned in his hand. That was plenty to make Jager suspicious, and the Croat as well. He unscrewed the grenade’s protective cap, yanked the igniter, opened the door, chucked in the grenade, and slammed it again.

  The blast made Jager’s head pound. Fragments rattled off the door. Jager flung it open once more, sprayed a quick burst into the chamber to catch any Lizards the grenade had missed Then he dove behind a massive oaken desk that had probably sat there since the days of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

  The Croat ran to the next door in, fired a few rounds from his submachine gun, then peered around the corner. That was the right order in which to do things. He grunted. “I think we maybe are lucky.”

  “Better for us to shoot up the place and not need to than to need to and not do it,” Jager said. The Croat nodded. Taking no chances even so, Jager crawled back to the outer doorway. Just as he got there, a blast like a 500-kilo bomb went off to the north. When he ever so cautiously looked out of the doorway, he saw a great hole in the outwall to Diocletian’s palace. The antiquarian in him lamented. The soldier rejoiced-Skorzeny’s raiders had distracted the Lizards enough to let Petrovic’s men lay the explosives next to the wall.

  He sprang to his feet, stormed forward. The best time to advance was while the enemy was momentarily stunned. Now the Lizards would have a doubly hard time: they’d have to fight Skorzeny’s men and keep Petrovic’s followers from. getting through the breach in the wall. This mad raid just might work.

  Then a stuttering roar filled the sky. Jager dove for the nearest cover he could find. The. Lizard helicopters were coming back.

  Split was in flames, with smoke mounting fast into the sky. Drefsab hissed in astonished disbelief-who could have imagined a town could go from peace to ruin in so short a time? “Oh, Skorzeny, how you will pay,” he whispered.

  Even as the helicopters reached the outskirts of Split, a big explosion sent a great cloud of dust leaping into the air. “They’ve blown up part of the wall,” the pilot said in dismay, scanning the electronically amplified vision display. “How did they get all these munitions into town under our muzzles?”

  “Some have probably been there all along-the Big Uglies were fighting among themselves when we got here, you know. As for the rest, they’re good at it,” Drefsab said bitterly. “We didn’t X-ray every bit of every single animal cart going in, and now we’re paying the price. But if we did that everywhere, we wouldn’t have enough males to do anything else. The fault here is mine; I accept it.”

  That made him feel virtuous. Otherwise, it did nothing to change matters. Split kept on burning. Radio calls for help kept pouring in. Every one of them reported some fresh Tosevite gain. “What do we do, superior sir?” the weapons officer asked, fixing Drefsab with worried eyes. “We have no rockets left and our machine-gun ammunition is low.”

  Worries about conserving ammunition, Drefsab thought, had cost the Race victories. If they lost here, it wouldn’t be on account of that. “If we don’t expend what we have, our ground position in Split falls,” he said. “Next to that, ammunition-or, come to that, three helicopters-counts for nothing. Maybe we can kill enough of the Big Uglies to make the rest break contact and give our males a chance. Let’s go try.”

  “It shall be done, superior sir.” Neither the pilot nor the weapons officer sounded enthusiastic. Drefsab couldn’t blame them for that-even if the Big Uglies didn’t have antiaircraft guns, the helicopters were still going into danger: if they’d armored all the wires and hydraulics heavily enough to protect em from rifle fire, the aircraft would have been too heavy to fly. But the pilot didn’t hesitate. He radioed Drefsab’s orders to his two comrades.

  The three helicopters skimmed low over the rooftops of Split. They started taking fire long before they got to the rectangular stone wall the Race had used as a perimeter for its base. Some bullets went spanng! off armored sections; others inched through sheet metal in less vital spots.

  Drefsab quickly realized the ground fire away from the fortress came from Big Uglies who just happened to have rifles and pistols. It turned into a storm of bullets when the aircraft approached the fighting zone. “Shall I return fire against the Tosevite males outside the walls, superior sir?” the weapons officer asked.

  “No,” Drefsab said. “The ones who got inside are even more important. If we have only limited ammunition, we’ll use at the point of decision.”

  Again, the pilot relayed Drefsab’s will to the males flying the other two helicopters. All three machines hovered above the narrowing area inside the walls that the Race still held. The machine guns roared. Drefsab felt a savage surge of satisfaction, almost as good as ginger, as Big Uglies twisted and fell under assault from the air.

  “We’ll get them out of there yet!” he cried.

  Another doorway. This time, Jager didn’t think it would be cover enough. He kicked in the door and rolled inside, automatic rifle at the ready. No Lizard shot at him. He crawled toward a north-facing window.

  Outside, death reigned. He’d hated the Lizards’ helicopters when he was in a panzer. Their rockets smashed through armor as if it were pasteboard. Against infantry, their machine guns were similarly destructive.

  The fire wasn’t aimed. It didn’t need to be. As he’d seen in France in the last war, machine guns. put out so many bullets that if this one didn’t get you, the next one would. Without luck amounting to divine intervention, anyone caught on the street without cover would be dead.

  The helicopters’ noses seemed to be spitting flame. Jager squeezed off a burst at the nearest of them, then rolled away as fast as he could. He had no idea whether he’d damaged the helicopter, but he was sure as need be that the Lizards would have spotted his muzzle flashes.

  Sure enough, bullets battered the wall. Some pierced the stones; others sent shards of glass from the
broken window flying like shell fragments. Something bit Jager in the leg. Blood began to soak into his trousers. It wasn’t a flood. He cautiously tried putting weight on the leg. It held. He might not run as fast as usual for a while, but he could move around pretty well. He headed up to the second story of the building. When he got there, he planned on firing another burst at the helicopters. It would also let him deliver plunging fire against the Lizards at the base of the walls He was still on the stairs when the firing from the helicopters died away: first one machine gun fell silent, then a second, then a third.

  His first thought was to rush-or come as close as he could to rushing with a sliver of glass in his leg-back down and join the final attack that would sweep away the last of the Lizards. His second thought was that his first one was less than smart. The Lizards surely had imagination enough to stop shooting and see how many men they could fool into thinking they’d run out of ammunition.

  He went up to the second floor after all. The helicopters still hung menacingly in the air, but they weren’t shooting. Men on the ground-Skorzeny’s forces and Petrovic’s both-kept blazing away at them, though. Jager fired, too. This time the Lizards didn’t shoot back.

  “Maybe you are out of ammo,” he muttered to himself.

  Even so, he didn’t hurry downstairs and rush out into the street. Maybe they weren’t out of ammo, too.

  Drefsab turned to the weapons officer in anger and dismay when the machine gun stopped firing. “Is that all of it?” he demanded.

  “Not quite, superior sir, but almost all,” the fellow answered. “I’ve reserved the last couple of hundred rounds. Whatever decision you make on how or if we use them, though, I suggest you make it quickly. We already have one male wounded back in the fighting compartment, and we can’t stay under such intense fire indefinitely. The odds of any one bullet doing us significant damage are low, but we are encountering a great many bullets.”