Striking the Balance (3 page)

“Your colonel must be a good officer,” he said—softly, because the brooding presence of the woods weighed on him. “This regiment has come a long way east since the bomb went off near Breslau.” That was part of the reason he needed to talk with the local commandant, though he wasn’t going to explain his reasons to a private who probably thought he was nothing but a damn kike anyway.

Stolid as an old cow, the sentry answered,
“Ja,”
and then shut up again. They walked past a whitewashed Panther tank in a clearing. A couple of crewmen were guddling about in the Panther’s engine compartment. Looking at them, hearing one grumble when the exposed skin between glove and sleeve stuck to cold metal, you might have thought war no different from any other mechanical trade. Of course, the Germans had industrialized murder, too.

They walked by more tanks, most of them also being worked on. These were bigger, tougher machines than the ones the Nazis had used to conquer Poland four and a half years before. The Nazis had learned a lot since then. Their panzers still didn’t come close to being an even match for the ones the Lizards used, though.

A couple of men were cooking a little pot of stew over an aluminum field stove set on a couple of rocks. The stew had some kind of meat in it—rabbit, maybe, or squirrel, or even dog. Whatever it was, it smelled delicious.

“Sir, the Jewish partisan is here,” the sentry said, absolutely nothing in his voice. That was better than the scorn that might have been there, but not much.

Both men squatting by the field stove looked up. The older one got to his feet. He was obviously the colonel, though he wore a plain service cap and an enlisted man’s uniform. He was in his forties, pinch-faced and clever-looking despite skin weathered from a lifetime spent in the sun and the rain and, as now, the snow.

“You!” Anielewicz’s mouth fell open in surprise. “Jäger!” He hadn’t seen this German in more than a year, and then only for an evening, but he wouldn’t forget him.

“Yes, I’m Heinrich Jäger. You know me?” The panzer officer’s gray eyes narrowed, deepening the network of wrinkles around their outer corners. Then they went wide. “That voice . . .  You called yourself Mordechai, didn’t you? You were clean-shaven then.” He rubbed his own chin. Gray mixed with the brownish stubble that grew there.

“You two know each other?” That was the moon-faced younger man who’d been waiting for the stew to finish. He sounded disbelieving.

“You might say so, Gunther,” Jäger answered with a dry chuckle. “Last time I was traveling through Poland, this fellow decided to let me live.” Those watchful eyes flicked to Mordechai. “I wonder how much he regrets it now.”

The comment cut to the quick. Jäger had been carrying explosive metal stolen from the Lizards. Anielewicz had let him travel on to Germany with half of it, diverting the other half to the United States. Now both nations were building nuclear weapons. Mordechai was glad the U.S.A. had them. His delight that the Third
Reich
had them was considerably more restrained.

Gunther stared.
“He
let
you
live? This ragged partisan?” Anielewicz might as well not have been there.

“He did.” Jäger studied Mordechai again. “I’d expected more from you than a role like this. You should be commanding a region, maybe the whole area.”

Of all the things Anielewicz hadn’t expected, failing to live up to a Nazi’s expectations of him ranked high on the list. His shrug was embarrassed. “I was, for a while. But then not everything worked out the way I’d hoped it would. These things happen.”

“The Lizards figured out you were playing little games behind their backs, did they?” Jäger asked. Back when they’d met in Hrubieszów, Anielewicz had figured he was no one’s fool. He wasn’t saying anything now to make the Jew change his mind. Before the silence got awkward, he waved a hand. “Never mind. It isn’t my business, and the less I know of what isn’t my business, the better for everyone. What do you want with us here and now?”

“You’re advancing on Lodz,” Mordechai said.

As far as he was concerned, that should have been an answer sufficient in and of itself. It wasn’t. Frowning, Jäger said, “Damn right we are. We don’t get the chance to advance against the Lizards nearly often enough. Most of the time, they’re advancing on us.”

Anielewicz sighed quietly. He might have known the German wouldn’t understand what he was talking about. He approached it by easy stages: “You’ve gotten good cooperation from the partisans here in western Poland, haven’t you, Colonel?” Jäger had been a major the last time Mordechai saw him. Even if he hadn’t come up in the world, the German had.

“Well, yes, so we have,” Jäger answered. “Why shouldn’t we? Partisans are human beings, too.”

“A lot of partisans are Jews,” Mordechai said. The easy approach wasn’t going to work. Bluntly, then: “There are still a lot of Jews in Lodz, too, in the ghetto you Nazis set up so you could starve us to death and work us to death and generally slaughter us. If the
Wehrmacht
goes into Lodz, the SS follows twenty minutes later. The second we see an SS man, we all go over to the Lizards again. We don’t want them conquering you, but we want you conquering us even less.”

“Colonel, why don’t I take this mangy Jew and send him on his way with a good kick in the ass?” the younger man—Gunther—said.

“Corporal Grillparzer, when I want your suggestions, be sure I shall ask for them,” Jäger said in a voice colder than the snow all around. When he turned back toward Mordechai, his face was troubled. He knew about some of the things the Germans had done to the Jews who’d fallen into their hands, knew and did not approve. That made him an unusual
Wehrmacht
man, and made Anielewicz glad he was the German on the other side of the parley. Still, he had to look out for the affairs of his own side: “You ask us to throw away a move that would bring us advantages. Such a thing is hard to justify.”

“What I’m telling you is that you would lose as much as you gain,” Mordechai answered. “You get intelligence from us about what the Lizards are doing. With Nazis in Lodz, the Lizards would get intelligence from us about you. We got to know you too well. We know what you did to us. We do sabotage back of the Lizards’ lines, too. Instead, we’d be raiding and sniping at you.”

“Kikes,” Gunther Grillparzer muttered under his breath. “Shit, all we gotta do is turn the Poles loose on ’em, and that takes care of that.”

Jäger started to bawl out his corporal, but Anielewicz held up a hand. “It’s not that simple any more. Back when the war just started, we didn’t have any guns and we weren’t much good at using them, anyhow. It’s not like that now. We’ve got more guns than the Poles do, and we’ve stopped being shy about shooting when somebody shoots at us. We can hurt you.”

“There’s some truth in this—I’ve seen as much,” Jäger said. “But I think we can take Lodz, and it would make immediate military sense for us to do just that. The place is a Lizard forward base, after all. How am I supposed to justify bypassing it?”

“What’s that expression the English have? Penny wise and pound foolish? That’s what you’d be if you started your games with the Jews again,” Mordechai answered. “You need us working with you, not against you. Didn’t you take enough of a propaganda beating when the whole world found out what you were doing here in Poland?”

“Less than you’d think,” Jäger said, the ice in his voice now aimed at Anielewicz. “A lot of the people who heard about it didn’t believe it.”

Anielewicz bit his lip. He knew how true that was. “Do you suppose they didn’t believe it because they didn’t trust the Lizards to tell the truth or because they didn’t think human beings could be so vile?”

That made Gunther Grillparzer mutter again, and made the sentry who’d brought Mordechai into camp shift his
Gewehr
98 so the muzzle more nearly pointed toward the Jew. Heinrich Jäger sighed. “Probably both,” he said, and Mordechai respected his honesty. “But the whys here don’t much matter. The whats do. If we bypass Lodz north and south, say, and the Lizards slice up into one of our columns from out of the city, the
Führer
would not be very happy with that.” He rolled his eyes to give some idea of how much understatement he was using.

The only thing Adolf Hitler could do to make Anielewicz happy would be to drop dead, and to do that properly he would have had to manage it before 1939. Nevertheless, he understood what Jäger was saying. “If you bypass Lodz to north and south, Colonel, I’ll make sure the Lizards can’t mount a serious attack on you from the city.”

“You’ll make sure?” Jäger said. “You can still do so much?”

“I think so,” Anielewicz answered.
I hope so.
“Colonel, I’m not going to talk about you owing me one.” Of course, by saying he wasn’t going to talk about it, he’d just talked about it. “I will say, though, that I delivered then and I think I can deliver now. Can you?”

“I don’t know,” the German answered. He looked down at the pot of stew, dug out a mess kit and spoon, and ladled some into it. Instead of eating, he passed the little aluminum tub to Mordechai. “Your people fed me then. I can feed you now.” After a moment, he added, “The meat is partridge. We bagged a couple this morning.”

Anielewicz hesitated, then dug in. Meat, kasha or maybe barley, carrots, onions—it stuck to the ribs. When he was done, he gave the mess kit and spoon back to Jäger, who cleaned them in the snow and then took his own share.

Between bites, the German said, “I’ll pass on what you’ve told me. I don’t promise anything will come of it, but I’ll do my best. I tell you this, Mordechai: if we do skirt Lodz, you’d better come through on your promise. Show that dealing with you people has a good side to it, show that you deliver, and the people above me are more likely to want to try to do it again.”

“I understand that,” Anielewicz answered. “The same goes back at you, I might add: if you break faith with us after a deal, you won’t like the partisans who show up in your backyard.”

“And I understand that,” Jäger said. “Whether my superiors will—” He shrugged. “I told you, I’ll do what I can. My word, at least, is good.” He eyed Anielewicz, as if daring him to deny it. Anielewicz couldn’t, so he nodded. The German let out a long, heavy sigh, then went on, “In the end, whether we go into Lodz or around it won’t matter, anyhow. If we conquer the territory around the city, it will fall to us, too, sooner or later. What happens then?”

He wasn’t wrong. That made it worse, not better. Anielewicz gave him credit: he sounded genuinely worried. Gunther Grillparzer, on the other hand, looked to be just this side of laughing out loud. Let a bunch of Nazi soldiers like him loose in Lodz and the results wouldn’t be pretty.

“What happens then?” Mordechai sighed, too. “I just don’t know.”

Ussmak sat in the base commandant’s office—
his
office now, even if he still wore the body paint of a landcruiser driver. He’d killed Hisslef, who had led the Race’s garrison at this base in the region of the SSSR known as Siberia. Ussmak wondered if
Siberia
was the Russki word for
deep freeze.
He couldn’t tell much difference between the one and the other.

Along with Hisslef, a lot of his chief subordinates were dead, too, hunted down in the frenzy that had gripped the rest of the males after Ussmak fired the first shot. Ginger had had a lot to do with both the shooting and the frenzy that followed it. If Hisslef had just had the sense to let the males gathered in the communal chamber yell themselves out complaining about the war, about Tosev 3, and about this miserable base in particular, he probably still would have been alive. But no, he’d come storming in, intent on stamping this out no matter what . . .  and now his corpse lay stiff and cold—in Siberian winter, very stiff and very cold—outside the barracks, waiting for the weather to warm up enough for a cremation.

“And Hisslef was legitimate commandant, and see what happened to him,” Ussmak muttered. “What will end up happening to
me?”
He had no millennia of authority to make his orders obeyed almost as if by reflex. Either he had to be obviously right, or else he had to make the males in the base obey him out of fear of what would happen if they didn’t.

His mouth fell open in a bitter laugh. “I might as well be a Big Ugly ruling a not-empire,” he said to the walls. They had to rule by fear; they had no tradition to give them legitimate authority. Now he sympathized with them. He understood in his gut how hard that was.

He opened a drawer in what had been Hisslef’s desk, pulled out a vial of powdered ginger. That was
his,
by the Emperor (the Emperor against whose officers he’d mutinied, though he tried not to think about that). He yanked off the plastic stopper, poured some of the powder into the palm of his hand, and flicked out his long forked tongue again and again, till the herb was gone.

Exhilaration came quickly, as it always did. In moments after tasting the ginger, Ussmak felt strong, fast, clever, invincible. In the top part of his mind, he knew those feelings, save perhaps for heightened reflexes, were an illusion. When he’d driven the land-cruiser into combat, he’d held off on tasting till he got out again: if you felt invincible when you really weren’t, you’d take chances that were liable to get you killed. He’d seen that happen to other males more times than he cared to recall.

Now, though—“Now I taste all I can, because I don’t want to think about what’s going to happen next,” he said. If the fleetlord wanted to blast this base from the air, Ussmak and his fellow mutineers had no antiaircraft missiles to stop them. He couldn’t surrender to the authorities; he’d put himself beyond the pale when he shot Hisslef, as his followers had with the killings that followed.

He couldn’t hold out indefinitely here, either. The base would run short of both food and hydrogen for fuel—and for heat!—before long. No supplies were coming in. He hadn’t worried about such things when he raised his personal weapon against Hisslef. He’d just worried about making Hisslef shut up.

“That’s the ginger’s fault,” he said querulously—even if his brain was buzzing with it while he complained. “It makes me as shortsighted as a Big Ugly.”