In the Balance (20 page)

Kirel waggled his fingers in a shrug. “Now that we know they fight from the sea, we can sink their big boats, and faster than they can hope to build them. The boats aren’t exactly inconspicuous, either. That problem will go away, and soon.”

“May it, be so.” But once Atvar got to worrying out loud, he wasn’t about to let himself be mollified so easily, “These missiles they’re trying to build—how are we supposed to shoot them all down? We came here intending, to fight savages whose only missiles came from bows. And do you know what the latest is?”

“Tell me, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said, in the tones of a male who understands he’d better listen sympathetically if he knows what’s good for him.

“In the past few days, for the first time, jet planes rose against our aircraft from both Deutschland and Britain. They’re still badly inferior to ours—especially the Britainish ones—but not nearly so much so as the primitive crates with revolving airfoils we’ve been facing.”

“I—hadn’t heard that, Exalted Fleetlord.” Now Atvar really had Kirel’s attention again. After that moment of surprise, the shiplord continued, “Wait a bit. Deutschland and Britain were enemies to each other before we landed, am I right?”

“Yes, yes. Britain and the U.S.A. and the SSSR and China against Deutschland and Italia; Britain and the U.S.A. and China against Nippon; but not, for some eggless reason, Nippon against the SSSR. If the Tosevites didn’t keep coming up with new things to throw at us, I’d swear on the Emperor’s name they were all mad.”

“Wait a bit,” Kirel repeated. “If Deutschland and Britain were foes until we landed, it’s not likely they’d share jet plane technology, is it?”

“
I
wouldn’t think so, but who can tell for certain
what
the Big Uglies would do? Maybe it’s having so many different empires on so little land that makes them the way they are.” The scrambled, convoluted way the Tosevites played the game of politics made even the maneuvers of the imperial court tame by comparison. Dealing with any one Tosevite official made Atvar feel out of his league. As for playing them off against one another, as the manuals suggested, he counted himself lucky that they weren’t exploiting him.

But Kirel was still worrying over the jets: “Exalted Fleetlord, if they don’t share technology, that means they can only have each developed it independently. They are like a bad virus, Fleetlord; they mutate—not physically, but technically, which is worse—too fast, maybe faster than we can
handle. Perhaps we should sterilize the planet of them.”

The fleetlord turned both eye sockets to bear on his subordinate. This, from the male who had urged giving the Big Uglies a chance to surrender before the Race choked off their communications?—or rather, failed to choke off their communications? “You think they represent so great a danger to us, Shiplord?”

“I do, Exalted Fleetlord. We are at a high level, and have been steady there for ages. They are lower, but rising quickly. We must smash them down while we still can.”

“If only the filthy creatures hadn’t hit the
56th Emperor Jossano,”
Atvar said mournfully.
If only we hadn’t kept so many of our bombs aboard one ship
, he added mentally. But no, he was not to blame for that; ancient doctrine ordained entrusting large stores of nuclear weapons only to the most reliable shiplords. As an officer of the Race should, he’d followed that ancient doctrine. No one could possibly think less of him for that—except that in so doing, he’d suffered a disaster. The way ancient doctrine corroded whenever it touched matters Tosevite worried him even more than the fighting down on the surface of Tosev 3.

“We still have some of the devices left,” Kirel persisted. “Maybe the Big Uglies will be more willing to submit if they see what we can do to their cities.”

Atvar threw back his head in disagreement. “We do not destroy the world toward which a settler fleet is already traveling.” That was what ancient doctrine said, doctrine based on the conquests of Rabotevs and Hallessi.

“Exalted Fleetlord, Tosev 3 appears to me to be dissimilar to our previous campaigns,” Kirel said, pressing his superior up to the edge of politeness. “The Tosevites have a greater capacity to resist than did the other subject races, and so seem to require harsher measures. The Deutsche in particular, Exalted Fleetlord—the cannon that wrecked the
56th Emperor Jossano
was theirs, even if it was on the land of the SSSR, and the missile the Big Uglies tried to launch, and now, you tell me, they fly jet planes as well.”

“No,” Atvar said. Ancient doctrine declared that new planets were not to be spoiled by radioactivity, which was apt to linger long after the war of subjugation ended. After all, the Race would be living here in perpetuity, integrating Tosev into the fabric of the Empire … and Tosev 3 didn’t have that much land to begin with.

But it did have hideously troublesome natives. Just moments before, the fleetlord had thought how poorly ancient doctrine worked when dealing with the Big Uglies. Moving away from it frightened him as he’d never been frightened before, as if he were cut off from the Emperor’s favor, adrift and alone. Yet would he deserve the Emperor’s favor if he led the Race to more disasters?

“Wait, Shiplord—I have changed my mind,” he told Kirel, who had begun to turn away. “Go ahead and use one on—what is the name of the place?”

“Berlin, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel answered. “It shall be done.”

5

“Paris,” George Bagnall said wearily. “I was here on holiday a couple of years before the war started. It’s not the same.”

“Nothing’s the same as it was before the war started,” Ken Embry said. “Hell, nothing’s the same as it was before the Lizards came, and that was bare weeks ago.”

“A good thing, too, else we’d all be kriegies by now, sitting behind, barbed wire and waiting for our next Red Cross packages,” Alf Whyte said. The navigator lifted a leg and shook his tired foot, then laughed wryly. “If we were kriegies with Red Cross packages, we’d likely see better grub than we’ve had on the way up here.”

“Right on both counts,” Bagnall said. The German occupiers of northern and central France could have swept up the English fliers a dozen times over on their hike to Paris, but hadn’t bothered. Some, in fact, cheered the men they might have shot under other circumstances. French peasants shared what they had with the Englishmen, but what they had was mostly potatoes and greens. Their rations made the ones back home sybaritic by comparison, a true testimonial to how meager they were.

Ken Embry said, “Talk about the Lizards, who’d’ve dreamt he’d be sorry to hear Berlin was smashed to flinders?”

The French papers, still German-dominated, had screamed of nothing else the past few days, shrieked about the fireball that consumed the city, wailed over unbelievable devastation, wept at the hundreds of thousands reported dead. Bagnall understood most of what the sheets proclaimed; his French was better than he’d giddily claimed in the moment of relief after the Lanc got down safe. Now he said, “I’d not have shed a tear if they’d managed to toast Hitler along with everyone else.”

“Nor I,” Embry agreed. “I’d not have minded carrying one of those bloody big bombs when we flew over Cologne, either. So long as it was us or the Nazis—but the Lizards complicate everything.”

“Too right they do.” Bagnall cast a wary eye to the sky, as if to watch
for a Lizard plane. Not that seeing one would do any good, if it had on board a superbomb like the one that hit Berlin. If the papers were to be believed—always a risky business in France, and all the more so after 1940—one single bomb had leveled an area miles across. You couldn’t even run from a bomb like that, let alone hide. What point in watching the skies, then?

As Bagnall brought his gaze back to earth, it settled on a faded, tattered propaganda poster from the Vichy government; though it had never held sway in the German-occupied parts of France, this was not the first such poster he’d seen. In big, tri-color letters, it proclaimed,
LABOURAGE ET PÂTURAGE SONT LES DEUX MAMELLES DE LA FRANCE
. Underneath, someone had neatly chalked a comment:
Merde
.

The flight engineer ignored the editorial remark. He stared in wonder and fascination at the slogan, marveling that anyone could have written it in the first place, let alone committed it to print and spread it broadcast. But there it was, in letters four inches high, all tricked out and made to look patriotic. Quite unable to help himself, he broke out in great, braying guffaws.

“What’s so bleeding funny?” asked Joe Simpkin, the Lanc’s rear gunner.

Bagnall still could not speak. He simply pointed at the Vichy poster. Their attention drawn to it, Embry and All Whyte started laughing, too.

Simpkin didn’t. He really had no French, though he’d picked up a few words, not all of them printable, since the bomber had to land. The edifying sentiment of the poster still remained beyond him, however. He scowled and asked, “What’s it say?”

Something like Work and farming are France’s two tits Bagnall answered between wheezes. Translating it into English set him off again, and everyone else with him. A thin Frenchman in a ragged jacket and a black beret frowned at the spectacle of seven obvious foreigners falling to pieces in the middle of the street. Because there were seven of them, he didn’t do anything more than frown.

“Tits, is it?” Simpkin said. He was from Gloucester, and spoke with a western accent. “France has better tits’n those, and legs, too.”

As if to prove him right, a pretty girl rode by on a rattling bicycle that was probably older than she was. Her skirt showed a lot of tanned leg. Bagnall could hear every click of the bicycle chain as it traveled over the sprocket. He could hear other bicycles, around the corner and out of sight. He could hear horses’ hooves, and the rattle of iron tyres on cobblestones as a horsedrawn wagon made its slow way along the street. He could hear someone working a hand-powered sewing machine, and an old woman calling her cat, whose name was Claude and who was, she said, a very naughty fellow. He felt as though he could hear the whole city.

“Paris isn’t Paris without a horde of motorcars, all trying to run you down at once,” he said.

“No, but it’s cleaner than it used to be because the cars are gone,” Embry said. “Smell how fresh the air is. We might as well still be out in the country. Last time I was here, the petrol fumes were bad as London.”

“No petrol fumes to worry about now,” Bagnall agreed. “No petrol to worry about, either—the Jerries have taken it all for their planes and tanks.”

Footsteps from around the corner told of someone approaching. The footsteps rang, as if even the fellow’s shoes were imbued with a sense of his importance. When he appeared a few seconds later, he proved better fed and much better dressed than most of the Frenchmen Bagnall had seen. Something gleamed silver on his lapel. As he drew near, Bagnall saw what it was: a little pin in the shape of a double-headed ax—the
francisque
, symbol of Vichy and collaboration.

The man started to walk on by, but the sight of men in unfamiliar uniforms, even ones as dirty and ragged as those of the Lanc’s crew had become, roused his curiosity.
“Pardonnez-moi, messieurs, mais—êtes-vous allemands?”
he asked, then switched languages:
“Sind Sie deutsche?”

“
Non, monsieur nous sommes anglais,”
Bagnall answered.

The Frenchman’s eyes opened wide. Of itself, his left hand twitched toward that lapel pin, as if to hide the
francisque
. Bagnall wondered what was going through his head, how he felt, having accommodated himself to the German yoke, on meeting men from a country which refused to wear it.

He spoke English, too. “All the world today is a part of humanity.” With a nod, he edged past the Englishmen and hurried away, looking back once over his shoulder.

“Slimy beggar,” All Whyte muttered. “All the world, my left one. I’d like to give him my boot up his backside.”

“So would I,” Bagnall said. “But the devil of it is, he’s right, or how long d’you think we’d last here traipsing about in RAF blue? It’d be a
Stalag
for us faster than you can say, ‘Hands up!’”