Upsetting the Balance (19 page)

Neither did Skoob, the gunner. He and Nejas had been together ever since the conquest fleet touched down on Tosev 3, and he was every bit as enamored of the straight and narrow as his commander. Now, though, he said, “Superior sir, I believe the driver has a point. Dividing and shifting effort in combat creates risks, some of which may be serious. While we and our equipment are transferred to attack the British, we grant the Deutsche time to recover, even to counterattack.”

“The Deutsche are staggering, ready to fall on the tailstumps they don’t have,” Nejas insisted. “The British have seen little of the war till now. Their miserable little island has been a base for endless mischief against us. Because it is an island, we can conquer it completely, remove this threat, and then resume our campaign against the Deutsche secure in the knowledge that Britain can no longer threaten our rear.”

He sounded like the dapper officers who had briefed the landcruiser units as they pulled them out of line against the Deutsche. Those officers had exuded wholesome confidence, too, so much confidence that Ussmak was certain they’d never led males in combat against the Big Uglies.

He said, “I don’t think military needs have all that much to do with it, or not in the usual way. I think more of it comes down to politics.”

“How do you mean, driver?” Nejas asked. The interrogative cough with which he punctuated his question was so loud and explosive, Ussmak knew he didn’t follow at all: a good commander, yes, but a natural-hatched innocent.

“Superior sir, when Straha fled to the Big Uglies, the Emperor only knows how many of our plans he took with him. They probably know just what we intend to try for the next two years. To keep them confused, we have to do different things now.”

“Curse Straha. May the Emperor turn his eye turrets away from him forever, now and in the world to come,” Nejas answered fiercely. After a moment, though, he said, “Yes, some truth may hatch from that eggshell. We—”

Before he could finish what he was saying, the transport, without warning, dropped like a stone. The chains that held the landcruiser secure in the fuselage groaned and creaked, but held. Ussmak’s seat belt held, too, to his relief, so he didn’t bounce all over the driver’s compartment as the aircraft dove.

As landcruiser commander, Nejas had a communications link with the pilot of the transport. He said, “We had to take evasive action against a Tosevite killercraft there. The machine guns stitched us up a bit, but no serious damage. We should land without trouble.”

“A good place not to have trouble, superior sir,” Ussmak agreed, and tacked on an emphatic cough to show he really meant it.

“What happened to the Big Ugly aircraft?” Skoob demanded. He had the proper attitude for a gunner: he wanted to be sure the foe was gone.

Unfortunately, this time the foe wasn’t gone. Nejas said, “I am told that the Tosevite male escaped. The British apparently had more aircraft available than we anticipated, and are throwing them all into the battle against our forces. Here and there, sheer numbers let some of them get through.”

“We’ve seen that before, superior sir,” Ussmak said. Individually, a landcruiser or killercraft of the Race was worth some large number of the machines the Big Uglies manufactured. But the Tosevites, after they’d lost that large number, proceeded to manufacture several more. When the Race lost a machine, it and the male or males who crewed it were gone for good.

Nejas might have picked the thought from his head. “With luck, our conquest of this island of British or whatever its name is will make it harder for the Big Uglies, at least in this part of Tosev 3, to continue building the weapons with which they oppose us.”

“Yes, superior sir, with luck,” Ussmak said. He’d given up on the idea that the Race would get much luck in its struggle with the Big Uglies. Maybe, along with their aircraft and landcruisers, the Tosevites manufactured luck in some hidden underground factory . . .

Nejas broke into his reverie, saying, “We are on the point of landing. Prepare yourselves.”

Sealed up in the landcruiser, Ussmak hadn’t noticed maneuvers less violent than the ones the transport had used to escape the Big Ugly raider. Now he braced himself for a jolt as the aircraft touched down. It came, hard enough to make his teeth click together. The airstrip, made by combat engineers in country for which “hostile” was a polite understatement, would be short and rough and probably pocked with shell holes, too. He wondered if any transports—and the males they were transporting—had been caught on the ground.

Things started happening very fast once the transport landed. The scream of its engines reversing thrust to help slow it made Ussmak’s head ache even through the aircraft fuselage and the steel and ceramic armor of the landcruiser. Deceleration shoved him forward against his seat belt.

The instant the transport stopped, Nejas ordered, “Driver, start your engine!”

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Ussmak replied, and obeyed. The hydrogen-burning turbine purred smoothly. Ussmak stuck his head out through the driver’s hatch to get a better view. At the moment he did so, the nose door of the transport opened, swinging up and back over the cockpit while the aircraft’s integral ramp rolled down to the ground.

Air from outside flowed into the fuselage, bringing with it the smells of powder and dirt and alien growing things. It was also cold, cold enough to make Ussmak shiver. The idea of being on an island, entirely surrounded by water, was less than appealing, too; back on Home, land dominated water, and islands on the lakes were small and few and far between.

A male with a lighted red wand ran up to guide the landcruiser out of the transport. “Forward—dead slow,” Nejas ordered. Ussmak engaged the lowest gear and eased forward. The landcruiser rattled over the metal floor of the fuselage, then nosed down onto the ramp. The male with the wand hadn’t done anything but urge Ussmak straight ahead?he might as well not have been there. The Race, though, took
better safe
as a general working rule.

By the way they fought, the Big Uglies had never heard of that rule.

A buzzing in the air, like the wingdrone of a flying biter immensely magnified . . . Ussmak hadn’t heard that sound often, but knew what it meant. He ducked back into the landcruiser and slammed the hatch shut. The Big Uglies’ killercraft shot by at a height not much greater than the top of the transport’s tail. Machine-gun bullets rattled from the glacis plate of Ussmak’s landcruiser. A couple hit the just-closed hatch. Had his head been sticking out through it, they would have hit him.

The male who’d been directing him out of the transport reeled away, blood pouring from two or three wounds. “Forward—top speed!” Nejas screamed into the microphone taped to Ussmak’s hearing diaphragm. Ussmak’s foot was already mashing the accelerator. If the Tosevite killercraft had poured bullets into the front end of the transport, what had it done to the rest of the machine?

“Superior sir, is the other landcruiser following us out?” he asked. With the prisms in the cupola, Nejas could see all around, while Ussmak’s vision was limited to ahead and a bit to the sides.

“Not quickly enough,” the commander answered. “And oh, he’d better hurry—there’s flame from one wing of the transport, and now from the fuselage, and—” The blast behind him drowned his words. The rear of the heavy landcruiser lifted off the ground. For a terrifying instant, Ussmak thought it was going to flip end over end. But it thudded back down, harder than any of the jolts it had given the crew while the transport took evasive action in the air.

More explosions followed, one after another, as the ammunition of the landcruiser trapped in the inferno of the fuselage began cooking off. “Emperors past, take the spirits of the crewmales into your hands,” Skoob said.

“May they take
our
spirits into their hands, too,” Nejas said. “Until that wreck is cleared, no traffic will be using the runway—and we need all the traffic we can get. More landcruisers, more soldiers, more ammunition, more hydrogen to keep our machines running—”

Ussmak hadn’t thought of that. When he’d rolled across the plains of the SSSR, he’d thought the conquest of Tosev 3 would be as easy as everyone back on Home had expected before the fleet left. Even though the Big Uglies had opposed him with landcruisers of their own rather than the animal-riding, sword-swinging soldiers he’d been led to expect, he and his fellow males disposed of them easily enough.

Even then, though, things had gone wrong: the sniper who’d killed his first commander, the raider who’d wrecked his landcruiser—he’d been lucky to get out of that alive, even if he’d had to jump into radioactive mud to do it. He’d picked up his ginger habit recovering in the hospital ship.

Things had got tougher in France. The terrain was worse, the Deutsche had better landcruisers, and they knew what to do with them. The Français were hostile, too. He hadn’t thought that would matter, but it did. Sabotage, bombings, endless nuisances, all of which caused damage and forced the males of the Race to divert efforts and guard against them.

And now this—trapped on an island, partially cut off from resupply, with the Big Uglies, even the ones who weren’t soldiers, certain to be more dangerous than the ones in France. “Superior sir,” Ussmak said, “the deeper we get into this war, the more it looks as if we might lose it.”

“Nonsense,” Nejas declared. “The Emperor has ordained that we bring this world into the light of civilization, and it shall be done.” Ussmak thought him optimistic to the point of idealism, but even protesting to a superior was unusual; arguing with his commander would have got him punished.

A male with fancy body paint ran up to the landcruiser, waving his arms. “Driver, halt,” Nejas said, and Ussmak did. The male clambered up onto the landcruiser. Ussmak heard Nejas open the cupola lid. The male shouted, his voice deep with excitement. “Yes, we can do that, superior sir,” Nejas answered him, “provided you have a clearing blade to fit to the front of the vehicle.”

Even really hearing only one side of the conversation, Ussmak had no trouble figuring out what the male wanted: help pushing the wrecked transport off the runway. The officer ran off. Not much later, a truck with a winch came rumbling up to the landcruiser. Combat engineers began attaching the blade.

Not far off, dirt suddenly rose into the air in a graceful fountain. One of the engineers screamed loud enough for Ussmak to hear him through Nejas’ microphone: “Emperor protect us, they’ve snuck a mortar inside the perimeter again!”

Another bomb landed, this one even closer. Fragments of the casing rattled off the sides of the landcruiser. A combat engineer went down, kicking; blood spurted from a wound in his side. A medical technician gave him first aid, then summoned a couple of other males to take him away for further treatment. The rest of the engineers kept on bolting the clearing blade to the landcruiser.

Ussmak admired their courage. He wouldn’t have done their job for all the money—maybe not even for all the ginger—on Tosev 3.

For that matter, his own job didn’t look like such a good risk at the moment.

Mordechai Anielewicz huddled in a deep foxhole in the middle of a thick clump of bushes. He hoped it would give him good enough cover. The forest partisans must have miscalculated how much their raids were annoying the Lizards, for the aliens were doing their best to sweep them into oblivion.

Firing came from ahead of him and from both sides. He knew that meant he ought to get up and move, but getting up and moving struck him as the quickest and easiest way to get himself killed. Sometimes sitting tight was the best thing you could do.

The Lizards were worse in the woods than even an urban Jew like him. He heard them skittering past his hole in the ground. He clutched his Mauser. If the Lizards started poking through the bushes that shielded him, he’d sell his life as dear as he could. If they didn’t, he had no intention of advertising his existence. The essence of partisan warfare was getting away to fight another day.

Time crawled by on leaden feet. He took a
Wehrmacht-
issue canteen from his belt, sipped cautiously—he had less water than he wanted, and didn’t know how long it would have to last. Going out to find more didn’t strike him as a good idea, not right now.

The bushes rustled.
Sh’ma yisroayl, adonai elohaynu, adonai ekhod
ran through his head: the first prayer a Jew learned, the last one that was supposed to cross his lips before he died. He didn’t say it now; he might have been wrong. But, as silently as he could, he turned toward the direction of the rustling. He was afraid he’d have to pop up and start shooting; otherwise the Lizards could finish him off with grenades.

“Shmuel?” A bare thread of whisper, but an unmistakably human voice.

“Yes. Who’s that?” The voice was too attenuated for him to recognize it, but he could make a good guess. “Jerzy?”

By way of reply, he got a laugh as discreet as the whisper had been. “You damn Jews are too damn smart, you know that?” the partisans’ point man answered. “Come on, though. You can’t hang around here. Sooner or later, they’ll spot you. I did.”

If Jerzy said staying around wasn’t safe, it probably wasn’t. Anielewicz scrambled up and out of his hidey-hole. “How’d you notice me, anyway?” he asked. “I didn’t think anybody could.”

“That’s just how,” the point man answered. “I looked around and I saw an excellent hiding place that didn’t look like it had anyone in it. I asked myself, who would be clever enough to take advantage of that kind of place? Your name popped into my head, and so—”

“I suppose I should be flattered,” Mordechai said. “You damn Poles are too damn smart, you know that?”

Jerzy stared at him, then laughed loud enough to alarm them both. “Let’s get out of here,” he said then, quietly once more. “We’ll head east, in the direction they’re coming from. Now that the main line of them is past, we shouldn’t have any trouble slipping away. They’re probably aiming to drive us against some other force they have waiting. That’s how the Nazis hunted partisans, anyhow.”