“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel promised. “May I respectfully suggest that none of us up here in orbit has enough firsthand experience with conditions down on the surface of Tosev 3?”
“There is some truth in what you say,” Atvar admitted. “Perhaps we should spend more time on the planet itself—in a reasonably secure area, preferably one with a reasonably salubrious climate.” He called up a flat map of the surface of Tosev 3 on a computer screen. One set of color overlays gave a security evaluation, with categories ranging from unconquered to pacflied (though depressingly little of the planet showed that placid pink tone). Another gave climatological data. He instructed the computer to show him where both factors were at a maximum.
Kirel pointed. “The northern coastal region of the subcontinental mass the Tosevites term Africa seems as near ideal as any region.”
“So it does,” Atvar said. “I have visited there before. It is pleasant; parts of it could almost be Home. Very well, Shiplord, make the requisite preparations. We shall temporarily shift headquarters to this region, the better to supervise the conduct of the conquest at close range.”
“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said.
Ludmila Gorbunova wanted to kick Generalleutnant Graf Walter von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt right where it would do the most good. Since the damned Nazi general was in Riga and she was stuck outside Hrubieszów, that wasn’t practical. In lieu of fulfilling her desire, she kicked at the mud instead. It clung to her boots, which did nothing to improve her mood.
She hadn’t thought of Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt as a damned Nazi when she was in Riga herself. Then he’d seemed a charming, kulturny general, nothing like the boorish Soviets and cold-blooded Germans it had mostly been her lot to deal with.
“Fly me one little mission, Senior Lieutenant Gorbunova,” she muttered under her breath. “Take a couple of antipanzer mines to Hrubieszów, then come on back here and we’ll send you on to Pskov with a pat on the fanny for your trouble.”
That wasn’t exactly what the kulturny general had said, of course, and he hadn’t tried to pat her on the fanny, which was one of the things that made him kulturny. But if he hadn’t sent her to Hrubieszów, her Kukuruznik wouldn’t have tried to taxi through a tree, which would have meant she’d still be able to fly it.
“Which would have meant I wouldn’t be stuck here outside of Hrubieszów,” she snarled, and kicked at the mud again. Some of it splashed up and hit her in the cheek. She snarled and spat.
She’d always thought of U-2s as nearly indestructible, not least because they were too simple to be easy to break. Down in the Ukraine, she’d buried one nose-first in the mud, but that could have been fixed without much trouble if she hadn’t had to get away from the little biplane as fast as she could. Wrapping a Kukuruznik around a tree, though—that was truly championship-quality ineptitude.
“And why did the devil’s sister leave a tree in the middle of the landing strip?” she asked the God in whom she did not believe. But it hadn’t been the devil’s sister. It had been these miserable partisans. It was their fault.
Of course she’d been flying at night. Of course she’d had one eye on the compass, one eye on her wristwatch, one eye on the ground and sky, one eye on the fuel gauge—she’d almost wished she was a Lizard, so she could look every which way at once. Just finding the partisans’ poorly lit landing strip had been—not a miracle, for she didn’t believe in miracles—a major achievement, that’s what it had been.
She’d circled once. She’d brought the Wheatcutter down. She’d taxied smoothly. She’d never seen the pine sapling—no, it was more than a sapling, worse luck—till she ran into it.
“Broken wing spars,” she said, ticking off the damage on her fingers. “Broken propeller.” Both of those were wood, and reparable. “Broken crankshaft.” That was of metal, and she had no idea what she was going to do about it—what she could do about it.
Behind her, someone coughed. She whirled around like a startled cat. Her hand flew to the grip of her Tokarev automatic. The partisan standing there jerked back in alarm. He was a weedy, bearded, nervous little Jew who went by the name Sholom. She could follow pieces of his Polish and pieces of his Yiddish, and he knew a little Russian, so they managed to make themselves understood to each other.
“You come,” he said now. “We bring blacksmith out from Hrubieszów. He look at your machine.”
“All right, I’ll come,” she answered dully. Yes, a U-2 was easy to work on, but she didn’t think a blacksmith could repair a machined part well enough to make the aircraft fly again.
He was one of the largest men she’d ever seen, almost two meters tall and seemingly that wide through the shoulders, too. By the look of him, he could have bent the crankshaft back into its proper shape with his bare hands if it had been in one piece. But it wasn’t just bent; it was broken in half, too.
The smith spoke in Polish, too fast for Ludmila to follow. Sholom turned his words into something she could understand: “Witold, he say if it made of metal, he fix it. He fix lots of wagons, he say.”
“Has he ever fixed a motorcar?” Ludmila asked. If the answer there was yes, maybe she did have some hope of getting off the ground again after all.
When he heard her voice, Witold blinked in surprise. Then he struck a manly pose. His already huge chest inflated like a balloon. Muscles bulged in his upper arms. Again, he spoke rapidly. Again, Sholom made what he said intelligible: “He say, of course he do. He say, for you he fix anything.”
Ludmila studied the smith through slitted eyes. She thought he’d said more than that; some of his Polish had sounded close to what would have been a lewd suggestion in Russian. Well. If she didn’t understand it, she didn’t have to react to it. She decided that would be the wisest course for the time being.
To Sholom, she said, “Tell him to come look at the damage, then, and see what he can do.”
Witold strutted along beside her, chest out, back straight, chin up. Ludmila was not a tall woman, and felt even smaller beside him. Whatever he might have hoped, that did not endear him to her.
He studied the biplane for a couple of minutes, then asked, “What is broken that takes a smith to fix?”
“The crankshaft,” Ludmila answered. Witold’s handsome face remained blank, even after Sholom translated that into Polish. Ludmila craned her neck to glare up at him. With poisonous sweetness, she asked, “You do know what a crankshaft is, don’t you? If you’ve worked on motorcars, you’d better.”
More translation from Sholom, another spate of fast Polish from Witold. Ludmila caught pieces of it, and didn’t like what she heard. Sholom’s rendition did nothing to improve her spirits: “He say he work on car springs, on fixing dent in—how you say this?—in mudguards, you understand? He not work on motor of motorcar.”
“Bozhemoi,” Ludmila muttered. Atheist she might be, but swearing needed flavor to release tension, and so she called on God. There stood Witold, strong as a bull, and, for all the use he was to her, he might as well have had a bull’s ring in his nose. She rounded on Sholom, who cringed. “Why didn’t you find me a real mechanic, then, not this blundering idiot?”
Witold got enough of that to let out a very bull-like bellow of rage. Sholom shrugged helplessly. “Before war, only two motor mechanics in Hrubieszów, lady pilot. One of them, he dead now—forget whether Nazis or Russians kill him. The other one, he licks the Lizards’ backsides. We bring him here, he tell Lizards everything. Witold, he may not do much, but he loyal.”
Witold followed that, too. He shouted something incendiary and drew back a massive fist to knock Sholom into the middle of next week.
The Jewish partisan had not looked to be armed. Now, with the air of a man performing a conjurer’s trick, he produced a Luger apparently from thin air and pointed it at Witold’s middle. “Jews have guns now, Witold. You’d better remember it. Talk about my mother and I’ll blow your balls off. We don’t need to take gówno from you Poles
any more.” In Polish or in Russian, shit was shit.
Witold’s pale blue eyes were wide and staring. His mouth was wide, too. It opened and closed a couple of times, but no words emerged. Still wordlessly, he turned on his heel and walked away. All the swagger had leaked out of him, like the air from a punctured bicycle tire.
Quietly, Ludmila told Sholom, “You’ve just given him reason to sell us out to the Lizards.”
Sholom shrugged. The Luger disappeared. “He has reason to want to breathe more, too. He keep quiet or he is dead. He knows.”
“There is that,” Ludmila admitted.
Sholom laughed. “Yes, there is that. All Russia is that, yes?”
Ludmila started to make an angry retort, but stopped before the words passed her lips. She remembered neighbors, teachers, and a couple of cousins disappearing in 1937 and 1938. One day they were there, the next gone. You didn’t ask questions about it, you didn’t talk about it. If you did, you would disappear next. That had happened, too. You kept your head down, pretended nothing was going on, and hoped the terror would pass you by.
Sholom watched her, his dark, deep-set eyes full of irony. At last, feeling she had to say something, she answered, “I am a senior lieutenant in the Red Air Force. Do you like hearing your government insulted?”
“My government?” Sholom spat on the ground. “I am Jew. You think the Polish government is mine?” He laughed again; this time, the sound carried the weight of centuries of oppression. “And then the Nazis come, and make Poles look like nice and kindly people. Who thinks anyone can do that?”
“So why are you here and not with the Lizards inside Hrubieszów?” Ludmila asked. A moment later, she realized the question was imperfectly tactful, but she’d already let it out.
“Some things are bad, some things are worse, some things are worst of all,” Sholom answered. He waited to see if Ludmila followed the Polish comparative and superlative. When he decided she did, he added, “For Jews, the Nazis are worst of all. For people, the Lizards are worst of all. Am I a person first, or am I a Jew first?”
“You are a person first,” Ludmila answered at once.
“From you, it sounds so easy,” Sholom said with a sigh. “My brother Mendel, he is in Hrubieszów.” The Jew shrugged yet again. “These things happen.”
Not knowing what to say, Ludmila kept quiet. She gave her U-2 one more anxious glance. It was covered up so it would be hard to spot from the air, but it wasn’t concealed the way a Red Air Force crew would have done the job. She did her best not to worry about it. The guerrillas remained operational, so their camouflage precautions were adequate.
In some way, their maskirovka was downright inspired, with tricks like those she’d seen from her own experience. A couple of kilometers away from their encampment, large fires burned and cloth tents simulated the presence of a good-sized force. The Lizards had shelled that area a couple of times, while leaving the real site alone.
Fires here were smaller, all of them either inside tents or else hidden under canvas sheets held up on stakes. Men went back and forth or sat around the fires, some cleaning their weapons, others gossiping, still others playing with packs of dog-eared cards.
With the men were a fair number of women, perhaps one in six of the partisans. Some, it seemed, were there for little more than to cook for the men and to sleep with them, but some were real soldiers. The men treated the women who fought like any other fighters, but towards the others they were as coarse and scornful as peasants were to their wives.
A fellow who wore a German greatcoat but who had to be a Jew got up from his card games to throw some powdered herbs into a pot and stir it with a wooden-handled iron spoon. Catching Ludmila’s eye on him, he laughed self-consciously and said something in Yiddish. She got the gist of it: he’d been a cook in Hrubieszów, and now he was reduced to this.
“Better a real cook should cook than someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing,” she answered in German, and set a hand on her stomach to emphasize what she meant.
“This, yes,” the Jew answered. He stirred the pot again. “But that’s salt pork in there. It’s the only meat we could get. So now we eat it, and I have to make it tasty, too?” He rolled his eyes up to heaven, as if to say a reasonable God would never have made him put up with such humiliation.
As far as Ludmila was concerned, the dietary regulations he agonized over transgressing were primitive superstitions to be ignored by modern, progressive individuals. She kept that to herself, though. Even the Great Stalin had made his peace with the Orthodox patriarch of Moscow and enlisted God on the side of the Red Army. If superstition would serve the cause, then what point to castigating it?
She was young enough that such compromises with medievalism still struck her as betrayals, in spite of the indoctrination she’d received on the subject. Then she realized the Jew undoubtedly thought cooking salt pork and, worse yet, eating it, was a hideous compromise with godlessness. He was wrong, of course, but that did not make him insincere.
When she got a bowl of the pork stew, she blinked in amazement at the flavor. He might have thought it an abomination, but he’d given it his best.
She was scrubbing out her bowl with snow when one of the camp women—not one of the ones who carried a rifle—came up to her. Hesitantly, in slow Russian, the woman (girl, really; she couldn’t have been more than seventeen) asked, “You really flew that airplane against the Lizards?”
“Yes, and against the Nazis before them,” Ludmila answered.
The girl’s eyes—very big, very blue—went wide. She was slim and pretty, and would have been prettier if her face hadn’t had a vacant, cowlike expression. “Heavens,” she breathed. “How many men did you have to screw to get them to let you do that?”
The question was innocent, candid. Somehow, that made it worse. Ludmila wanted to shake her. “I didn’t screw anybody,” she said indignantly. “I—”
“It’s all right,” the girl—Stefania, that’s what her name was—interrupted. “You can tell me. It’s not like it’s something important. If you’re a woman, you have to do such things now and again. Everybody knows it.”
“I—didn’t—screw—anybody,” Ludmila repeated, spacing out the words as if she were talking to a half-wit. “Plenty of men have tried to screw me. I got to be a Red Air Force pilot because I’d been in the Osoaviakhim—the state pilot training program—before the war. I’m good at what I do. If I weren’t, I’d have got killed twenty times by now.”
Stefania studied her. The intent look on the Polish girl’s face made Ludmila think she’d made an impression on her. Then Stefania shook her head; her blond braids flipped back and forth. “We know what we get from Russians—nothing but lies.” As Witold had, she walked away.
Ludmila wished she were pointing a pistol at the stupid little bitch. She finished cleaning her bowl. This was her second trip outside the Soviet Union. Both times, she’d seen how little use foreigners had for her country. Her immediate reaction to that was disdain. Foreigners had to be ignorant reactionaries if they couldn’t appreciate the glorious achievements of the Soviet state and its promise to bring the benefits of scientflic socialism to all mankind.
Then she remembered the purges. Had her cousin, her geometry teacher, and the man who ran the tobacconist’s shop across from her block of flats truly been counterrevolutionaries, wreckers, spies for the Trotskyites or the decadent imperialists? She’d wondered at the time, but hadn’t let herself think about it since. Such thoughts held danger, she knew instinctively.
How glorious were the achievements of the Soviet state if you didn’t dare think about them? Frowning, she piled her bowl with all the rest.
V
Ussmak didn’t think he’d ever seen such a sorry-looking male in all his days since hatchlinghood. It wasn’t just that the poor fellow wore no body paint, although being bare of it contributed to his general air of misery. Worse was the way his eye turrets kept swiveling back toward the Big Ugly for who
m he was interpreting, as if that Tosevite were the sun and he himself only a very minor planet.
“This is Colonel Boris Lidov,” the male said in the language of the Race, although the title was in the Russki tongue. “He is of the People’s Commissariat for the Interior—the NKVD—and is to be your interrogator.”
Ussmak glanced over at the Tosevite male for a moment. He looked like a Big Ugly, and not a particularly impressive one: skinny, with a narrow, wrinkled face, not much fur on the top of his head, and a small mouth drawn up even tighter than was the Tosevite norm. “That’s nice,” Ussmak said; he’d figured the Big Uglies would have questions for him. “Who are you, though, friend? How did you get stuck with this duty?”
“I am called Gazzim, and I was an automatic riflemale, second grade, before my mechanized infantry combat vehicle was destroyed and I taken prisoner,” the male replied. “Now I have no rank. I exist on the sufferance of the Soviet Union.” Gazzim lowered his voice. “And now, so do you.”
“Surely it’s not so bad as that,” Ussmak said. “Straha, the shiplord who defected, claims most Tosevite not-empires treat captives well.”
Gazzim didn’t answer. Lidov spoke in the local language, which put Ussmak in mind of the noises a male made when choking on a bite too big to swallow. Gazzim replied in what sounded like the same language, perhaps to let the Tosevite know what Ussmak had said.
Lidov put the tips of his fingers together, each digit touching its equivalent on the other hand. The strange gesture reminded Ussmak he was indeed dealing with an alien species. Then the Tosevite spoke in his own tongue once more. Gazzim translated: “He wants to know what you are here for.”
Striking the Balance Page 15
