Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  His stomach growled again. It didn’t care that he would suffer agonies of thirst if he ate his herring without water. All it knew was that it was still mostly empty, and that the fish would help fill it up.

  With a squeal of brakes, the train pulled to a halt Nussboym almost slipped down onto men below. Ivan had done that once. They’d fallen on him like a pack of wolves, beating and kicking him till he was black and blue. After that, the fellows perched on the baggage racks had learned to hang on tight during stops.

  “Where are we, do you think?” somebody down below asked.

  “In hell,” somebody else answered, which produced laughs both more bitter and more sincere than the ones the guard had got for himself.

  “This’ll be Pskov, I bet,” a zek in the middle bunk declared. “I hear tell we’ve cleared the Lizards away from the railroad line that leads there from the west. After that”—he stopped sounding so arrogant and sure of himself—“after that, it’s north and east, on to the White Sea, or maybe to the Siberian gulags.”

  Nobody spoke for a couple of minutes after that. Winter labor up around Archangel or in Siberia was enough to daunt even the heartiest of spirits.

  Small clangs and jerks showed that cars were either being added to the train or taken off it. One of the zeks sitting on the bottom bunks said, “Didn’t the Hitlerites take Pskov away from the rodina? Shit, they can’t do anything worse to us than our own people do.”

  “Oh yes, they can,” Nussboym said, and told them about Treblinka.

  “That’s Lizard propaganda, is what that is,” the big-mouthed zek in the middle bunk said.

  “No,” Nussboym said. Even in the face of opposition from the powerful prisoner, about half the zeks in the car ended up believing him. He reckoned that a moral victory.

  A guard came back with a bucket of water, a dipper, and a couple of mugs. He looked disgusted with fate, as if by letting the men drink he was granting them a privilege they didn’t deserve. “Come on, you slimy bastards,” he said. “Queue up—and make it snappy. I don’t have all day.”

  Healthy men drank first, then the ones with tubercular coughs, and last of all the three or four luckless fellows who had syphilis. Nussboym wondered if the arrangement did any good, because he doubted the NKVD men washed the mugs between uses. The water was yellowish and cloudy and tasted of grease. The guard had taken it from the engine tender instead of going to some proper spigot. All the same, it was wet. He drank his allotted mug, ate the herring, and felt, for a moment, almost like a human being instead of a zek.

  Georg Schultz spun the U-2’s two-bladed wooden prop. The five-cylinder Shvetsov radial caught almost at once; in a Russian winter, an air-cooled engine was a big advantage. Ludmila Gorbunova had heard stories about Luftwaffe pilots who had to light fires on the ground under the nose of their aircraft to keep their antifreeze from freezing up.

  Ludmila checked the rudimentary collection of dials on the Kukuruznik’s instrument panel. All in all, they told her nothing she didn’t already know: the Wheatcutter had plenty of fuel for the mission she was going to fly, the compass did a satisfactory job of pointing toward north, and the altimeter said she was still on the ground.

  She released the brake. The little biplane bounced across the snowy field that served as an airstrip. Behind her, she knew, men and women with brooms would sweep snow over the tracks her wheels made. The Red Air Force took maskirovka seriously.

  After one last jounce, the U-2 didn’t come down. Ludmila patted the side of the fuselage with a gloved but affectionate hand. Though designed as a primary trainer, the aircraft had harassed first the Germans and then the Lizards. Kukuruznik’s flew low and slow and, but for the engine, had almost no metal; they evaded the Lizards’ detection systems that let the alien imperialist aggressors hack more sophisticated warplanes out of the sky with ease. Machine guns and light bombs weren’t much, but they were better than nothing.

  Ludmila swung the aircraft into a long, slow turn back toward the field from which she’d taken off. Georg Schultz still stood out there. He waved to her and blew her a kiss before he started trudging for the pine woods not far away.

  “If Tatiana saw you doing that, she’d blast your head off from eight hundred meters,” Ludmila said. The slipstream that blasted over the windscreen into the open cockpit blew her words away. She wished something would do the same for Georg Schultz. The German panzer gunner made a first-rate mechanic; he had a feel for engines, the way some people had a feel for horses. That made him valuable no matter how loud and sincere a Nazi he was.

  Since the Soviet Union and the Hitlerites were at least formally cooperating against the Lizards, his fascism could be overlooked, as fascism had been overlooked till the Nazis treacherously broke their nonaggression pact with the USSR on 22 June 1941. What Ludmila couldn’t stomach was that he kept trying to get her to go to bed with him, though she had about as much interest in sleeping with him as she did with, say, Heinrich Himmler.

  “You’d think he would have left me alone after he and Tatiana started jumping on each other,” Ludmila said to the cloudy sky. Tatiana Pirogova was an accomplished sniper who’d shot at Nazis before she started shooting at Lizards. She was at least as deadly as Schultz, maybe deadlier. As far as Ludmila could see, that was what drew them together.

  “Men,” she added, a complete sentence. Despite enjoying Tatiana’s favors, Schultz still kept trying to lay her, too. Under her breath, she muttered, “Damned nuisance.”

  She buzzed west across Pskov. Soldiers in the streets, some in Russian khaki, others in German field-gray, still others in winter white that made their nationality impossible to guess, waved at her as she flew by. She didn’t mind that at all. Sometimes, though, human troops would fire at her in the air, on the assumption that anything airborne had to belong to the Lizards.

  A train pulled out of the station, heading northwest. The exhaust from the locomotive was a great black plume that would have been visible for kilometers against the snow had the low ceiling not masked it. The Lizards liked shooting up trains whenever they got the chance.

  She waved to the train when she came closest to it She didn’t think anyone on board saw it, but she didn’t care. Trains pulling out of Pskov were a hopeful sign. During the winter, the Red Army—and the Germans, Ludmila thought reluctantly—had pushed the Lizards back from the city, and back from the railroad lines that ran through it. These days, you could. If you were lucky, get through to Riga by train.

  But you still needed luck, and you still needed time. That was why Lieutenant General Chill had sent his despatch with her—not only did it have a better chance of getting through, it would reach his Nazi counterpart in the Latvian capital well before it could have got there by rail.

  Ludmila skinned back her teeth in a sardonic grin. “Oh, how the mighty Nazi general wished he could have sent a mighty Nazi flier to carry his message for him,” she said. “But he didn’t have any mighty Nazi fliers, so he was stuck with me.” The expression on Chill’s face had been that of a man biting into an unripe apple.

  She patted the pocket of her fur-lined leather flying suit in which the precious despatch rested. She didn’t know what it said. By the way Chill had given it to her, that was a privilege she didn’t deserve. She laughed a little. As if he could have stopped her from opening the envelope and reading what was inside! Maybe he thought she wouldn’t think of that. If he did, he was stupid even for a German.

  Perverse pride, though, had made her keep the envelope sealed. General Chill was—formally—an ally, and had entrusted her with the message, no matter how reluctant he was about it. She would observe the proprieties in return.

  The Kukuruznik buzzed along toward Riga. The countryside over which it skimmed was nothing like the steppe that surrounded Kiev, where Ludmila had grown up. Instead of endless empty kilometers, she flew above snow-dappled pine woods, part of the great forest that stretched east to Pskov and far, far beyond. Here and there, farms and villages app
eared in the midst of the forest. At first, the human settlements in the middle of the wilderness almost startled Ludmila. As she flew on toward the Baltic, they grew ever more frequent.

  Their look changed about halfway to Riga, when she crossed from Russia into Latvia. It wasn’t just that the buildings changed, though plaster walls and tile roofs took the place of wood and sometimes thatch. Things became more orderly, too, and more conservative of space: all the land was used for some clearly defined purpose—cropland, town, woodlot, or whatever it might have been. Everything plainly was being exploited, not lying around waiting in case some use eventually developed for it.

  “It might as well be Germany,” Ludmila said aloud. The thought gave her pause. Latvia had only been reincorporated into the Soviet Union a little more than a year before the Hitlerites treacherously invaded the rodina. Reactionary elements there had welcomed the Nazis as liberators, and collaborated with them against Soviet forces. Reactionary elements in the Ukraine had done the same thing, but Ludmila tried not to think about that.

  She wondered what sort of reception she’d get in Riga. Pskov had had Soviet partisans lurking in the nearby forests, and was now essentially a codominion between German and Soviet forces. She didn’t think any signflicant Soviet forces operated anywhere near Latvia—farther south, maybe, but not by the Baltic.

  “So,” she said, “there soon will be a signflicant Soviet force in Latvia: me.” The slipstream blew away the joke, and the humor from it.

  She found the Baltic coast and followed it south toward Riga. The sea had frozen some kilometers out from the shore. The sight made her shiver. Even for a Russian, that was a lot of ice. Smoke rose from Riga harbor. The Lizards had been pummeling harbors lately. When Ludmila approached the docks, she started drawing rifle fire. Shaking her fists at the idiots who took her biplane for a Lizard aircraft, she swung away and looked around for someplace to land the Kukuruznik.

  Not far from what looked like the main boulevard, she spied a park full of bare-branched trees. It had enough empty space—snow and dead, yellow-brown grass—and to spare for the biplane. No sooner had she slid to a jerky stop than German troops in field-gray and white came running up to her.

  They saw the red stars on the Kukuruznik’s wings and fuselage. “Who are you, you damned Russian, and what are you doing here?” one of them shouted.

  A typically arrogant German, he assumed she spoke his language. As it happened, he was right this time. “Senior Lieutenant Ludmila Gorbunova, Red Air Force,” Ludmila answered in German. “I have with me a despatch for General Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt from General Chill in Pskov. Will you be so kind as to take me to him? And will you camouflage this aircraft so the Lizards cannot spot it?”

  The Hitlerite soldiers drew back in surprise to hear her voice. She was sitting in the cockpit, and her leather flying helmet and thick winter gear had effectively disguised her sex. The German who’d spoken before leered now and said, “We’ve heard of pilots who call themselves Stalin’s Hawks. Are you one of Stalin’s Sparrows?”

  Now he used du rather than Sie. Ludmila wasn’t sure whether he intended the familiar intimacy or insult. Either way, she didn’t care for it. “Perhaps,” she answered in a voice colder than the weather, “but only if you’re one of Hitler’s Jackasses.”

  She waited to see whether that would amuse or anger the German. She was in luck; not only did he laugh, he threw back his head and brayed like a donkey. “You have to be a jackass to end up in a godforsaken place like this,” he said. “All right, Kamerad—no, Kameradin—Senior Lieutenant, I’ll take you to headquarters. Why don’t you just come along with me?”

  Several Germans ended up escorting her, maybe as guards, maybe because they didn’t want to leave her alone with the first one, maybe for the novelty of walking along with a woman while on duty. She did her best to ignore them; Riga interested her more.

  Even after being battered by years of war, it didn’t look like a godforsaken place to her. The main street—Brivibas Street, it was called (her eyes and brain needed a little while to adjust to the Latin alphabet)—had more shops, and smarter-looking ones, than she’d seen in Kiev. The clothes civilians wore on the street were shabby and none too clean, but of better fabric and finer cut than would have been usual in Russia or the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

  Some of the people recognized her gear. In spite of her German escort, they yelled at her in accented Russian and in Latvian. She knew the Russian was insulting, and the Latvian sounded less than complimentary. To rub in the point, one of the Germans said, “They love you here in Riga.”

  “There are plenty of places where they love Germans even more,” she said, which made the Nazi shut up with a snap. Had it been a chess game, she would have won the exchange.

  The Rathaus where the German commandant had his headquarters was near the corner of Brivibas and Kaleiyu Streets. To Ludmila, the German-style building looked old as time. Like the Krom in Pskov, it had no sentries on the outside to give away its location to the Lizards. Once inside the ornately carved doors, though, Ludmila found herself inspected by two new and hostile Germans in cleaner, fresher uniforms than she was used to seeing.

  “What do you have here?” one of them asked her escort.

  “Russian flier. She says she has a despatch from Pskov for the commanding general,” the talky soldier answered. “I figured we’d bring her here and let you headquarters types sort things out.”

  “She?” The sentry looked Ludmila over in a different way. “By God, it is a woman, isn’t it? Under all that junk she’s wearing, I couldn’t tell.”

  He plainly assumed she spoke only Russian. She did her best to look down her nose at him, which wasn’t easy, since he was probably thirty centimeters the taller. In her best German, she said, “It will never matter to you one way or the other, I promise you that.”

  The sentry stared at her. Her escorts, who’d been chatting with her enough to see her more or less as a human being—and who, like any real fighting men, had no great use for headquarters troops—suppressed their snickers not quite well enough. That made the sentry look even less happy. In a voice full of winter, he said, “Come with me. I will take you to the commandant’s adjutant.”

  The adjutant was a beefy, red-faced fellow with a captain’s two pips on his shoulder straps. He said, “Give me this despatch, young lady. Generalleutnant Graf Walter von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt is a busy man. I shall convey to him your message as soon as it is convenient.”

  Maybe he thought the titles and double-barreled name would impress her. If so, he forgot he was dealing with a socialist. Ludmila stuck out her chin and looked stubborn. “Nein,” she said. “I was told by General Chill to give the message to your commandant, not to anyone else. I am a soldier, I follow orders.”

  Red-Face turned redder. “One moment,” he said, and got up from his desk. He went through a door behind it. When he came out again, he might have been chewing on a lemon. “The commandant will see you.”

  “Good.” Ludmila headed for that door herself. Had the adjutant not hastily got out of her way, she would have walked right over him.

  She’d expected an overbred aristocrat with pinched features, a haughty expression, and a monocle. Walter von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt had pinched features, all right, but plainly for no other reason than that he was a sick man. His skin looked like yellow parchment drawn tight over bones. When he was younger and healthier, he’d probably been handsome. Now he was just someone carrying on as best he could despite illness.

  He did get up and bow to her, which took her by surprise. His cadaverous smile said he’d noticed, too. Then he surprised her again, saying in Russian, “Welcome to Riga, Senior Lieutenant. So—what news do you bring me from Lieutenant General Chill?”

  “Sir, I don’t know.” Ludmila took out the envelope and handed it to him. “Here is the message.”

  Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt started to open it, then paused and got up from his chair again. He hurriedly lef
t the office by a side door. When he came back, his face was even paler than it had been. “I beg your pardon,” he said, finishing the job of opening the envelope. “I seem to have come down with a touch of dysentery.”

  He had a lot more than a touch; by the look of him, he’d fall over dead one fine day before too long. Intellectually, Ludmila had known the Nazis clung to their posts with as much courage and dedication—or fanaticism, one—as anyone else. Seeing that truth demonstrated, though, sometimes left her wondering how decent men could follow such a system.

  That made her think of Heinrich Jäger and, a moment later, start to blush. General Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt was studying General Chill’s note. To her relief, he didn’t notice her turning pink. He grunted a couple of times, softly, unhappily. At last, he looked up from the paper and said, “I am very sorry, Senior Lieutenant, but I cannot do as the German commandant of Pskov requests.”

  She hadn’t imagined a German could put that so delicately. Even if he was a Hitlerite, he was kulturny. “What does General Chill request, sir?” she asked, then added a hasty amendment: “if it’s not too secret for me to know.”

  “By no means,” he answered—he spoke Russian like an aristocrat. “He wanted me to help resupply him with munitions—” He paused and coughed.

  “So he would not have to depend on Soviet equipment, you mean,” Ludmila said.

  “Just so,” Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt agreed. “You saw the smoke in the harbor, though?” He courteously waited for her nod before continuing, “That is still coming from the freighters the Lizards caught there, the freighters that were full of arms and ammunition of all sorts. We shall be short here because of that, and have none to spare for our neighbors.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Ludmila said, and found she was not altogether lying for the sake of politeness. She didn’t want the Germans in Pskov strengthened in respect to Soviet forces there, but she didn’t want them weakened in respect to the Lizards, either. Finding a balance that would let her be happy on both those counts would not be easy. She went on, “Do you have a written reply for me to take back to Lieutenant General Chill?”