In the Balance w-1 Read online

  “We have to destroy the factories in which these weapons are produced,” Atvar said.

  “Yes Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel answered.

  Not, Atvar noted, “It shall be done.” From the air, one factory looked like another. Destroying all the factories in Deutschland was a tall order. Compared to the size of the planet, Deutschland was a small empire, but even small empires, Atvar was learning, covered a lot of ground. The other Tosevite empires had factories, too. How close were they to making missiles?

  The fleetlord did his best to look on the bright side. “Their failure gives us the warning we need. We shall not be taken unawares even if they succeed in launching missiles at us.” We had better not be, his tone said.

  “Our preparations are adequate,” Kirel said. He did his best to keep on sounding businesslike and military, but his voice had an edge to it that Atvar understood perfectly well: if that was the bright side, it was hardly worth looking for.

  The train chuffed to a halt somewhere on the south Russian steppe; men in field gray sprang down and went efficiently to work. They would have been more efficient still, Karl Becker thought, if they’d been allowed to proceed in their usual methodical fashion rather than at a dead run. But an order from the Fuhrer was an order from the Fuhrer. At the dead run they went.

  “The ground will not be adequately prepared, Karl,” Michael Arenswald said sadly. Both men were part of the engineering detachment of Heavy Artillery Battalion Dora.

  “This is true, of course,” Becker said with a fatalistic nod, “but how many shots are we likely to be able to fire before the Lizards descend on us?” They were sixty kilometers from the Lizard base. With aircraft, though, especially the ones the Lizards flew, sixty kilometers passed in the blink of an eye. Karl Becker was a long way from stupid; he recognized a suicide mission when he heard one.

  If Arenswald did, too, he kept it to himself. “We might even get off half a dozen before they figure out what’s happening to them.”

  “Oh, quatsch!” said Becker, a Berliner. He jabbed an index finger out at his friend. “You are a dead man, I am a dead man, we are all dead men, the whole battalion of us. The only question left unanswered is whether we can take enough Lizards with us to make our deaths worth something.”

  “Sooner or later, we are all dead men.” Arenswald laughed. “We’ll give them a surprise before we go, at any rate.”

  “With luck, we may manage that,” Becker admitted. “We-” He broke off and started coughing. The battalion had a chemical unit attached to it, to send up, smoke and hide, it from view from the air while it was setting up for action. Some of the smoke came from nothing more sophisticated than flaming buckets of motor oil. Breathing it was probably doing Becker’s lungs no good, but odds were it wouldn’t kill him before be died of other causes. He coughed again, then ignored it.

  Men swarmed over the tram like ants Special tracks had been laid for the heavy artillery battalion, four gently curved arcs, each always a constant distance from its neighbors The inner two sets of rails were exactly twenty feet apart. Crews began moving specially built diesel construction cranes to the outer pair of tracks for aid in the upcoming assembly process.

  Looking at all the purposeful activity, Arenswald laughed again. “Not bad, considering how understrength we are.” The smoke was already turning his face sooty.

  “A lot of people we don’t need, considering we won’t be here long.” When Heavy Artillery Battalion Dora came into Russia, it was accompanied by a security unit that included three hundred infantry and secret police with dogs, and by a four-hundred-man reinforced flak battalion. Neither the one nor the other mattered now. If the Lizards chose to come this way, German infantry could not hold them off, and the flak battalion could not keep their planes away. Dora’s only hope of accomplishing anything was going into action before the enemy noticed it was there. And considering what Dora was…

  Becker laughed, too. Arenswald gave him a curious look. He explained: “Keeping Dora a secret is like taking an elephant out of its enclosure at the Berlin Tiergarten and walking it out of the-zoo without the keepers’ paying you any mind.”

  “Something to that.” Arenswald waved at the ever-denser smoke all around. “But you see, Karl, we have a very large pocket here.”

  “We have a very large elephant, too.” Becker hopped down from the train and walked between the two center tracks, the ones that would have to bear Dora’s weight. The tracks were laid with closely spaced cross ties to help strengthen the roadbed, but the ground was not nearly so stony as it should have been. That would matter a great deal if Dora stayed here a long while. For the few shots it was likely to get off, the ground was less important.

  The next few days passed in a berserk blaze of work, with sleep, snatched in odd moments, often under the train to give some protection in case Lizard aircraft did come by. The manuals said assembling Dora needed a week. Driven by the lash of fear for the fatherland, the heavy artillery battalion did it in four and a half days.

  The two pieces of the bottom half of the gun carriage went onto the two central tracks and were aligned with each other. They rested on twenty rail trucks, again to distribute Dora’s mass as widely as possible. Becker was part of the crew that hydraulically leveled the lower mount.

  The diesel cranes lifted crossbeams onto the lower mount, then placed the two-piece upper mount where it belonged. The top of the carriage held Dora’s loading assembly and the trunnion supports. It was joined to the lower mount by dozens of heavy bolts. Becker went down one side of the carriage and Arenswald down the other, checking that every one was in place.

  They met at the rear, grinned, exchanged drawings, then went up the carriage to check each other’s sides. Everything had to work once the shooting started; things would go wrong soon enough after that.

  Assembly went faster once the carriage was together. The trunnions, the gun cradle, the breech, and the barrel sections all were raised to their proper positions. When Dora was at last complete, Becker admired the monster gun through blowing smoke. Carnage and all, the 80-centimeter cannon was fifty meters long and eleven meters tall; its barrel alone was thirty meters long. Somewhere far above the smoke, Becker heard a Lizard plane whine past. His shoulders slumped; his hands made futile fists. “No, God,” he said, almost as a threat, “not now, not when we were so close.”

  Michael Arenswald clapped him on the shoulder. “They’ve flown over us before, Karl. It will be all right; you’ll see.”

  No bombs fell on them; no guided rockets exploded by the gun carriage. A crane lifted from a freight car a seven-tonne shell, slowly swung the great projectile, more than five meters long and almost a meter thick, onto the loading assembly. It didn’t look like an artillery shell, not to Becker. It looked like something more primeval, as if Tyrannosaurus rex had been reincarnated as artillery.

  The breech received the shell, was closed with a clang that sounded like a factory noise. The whole battalion cheered as the gun barrel slowly rose, its tip no doubt projecting out of the smoke screen now. Laughing, Arenswald said, “It reminds me of the world’s biggest prick getting hard.”

  “That’s one hell of a hard-on, all right,” Becker said.

  The barrel reached an angle of almost forty-five degrees, stopped. Along with everyone else around, Becker turned away: from it, covered his ears, opened his mouth.

  The blast was like nothing he’d ever imagined. It sucked all the air out of his lungs, shook him like a terrier shaking a rat. Stunned, he staggered, stumbled, sat down hard on the ground. His head roared. He wondered if he would ever hear anything through that oceanic clamor again. But he could still see. Sprawled in the dirt beside him, Michael Arenswald gave a big thumbs-up.

  A radar technician on the grounded transport ship 67th Emperor Sohrheb stared at the screen in front of him, hissed in dismay. Automatic alarms began to yammer even before Breltan shrieked, “Missile incoming!” A warning had come down that the Big Uglies were playing wi
th missiles, but he’d never expected to encounter one of their toys so soon. He raised both eye turrets to the ceiling in bemusement. The Big Uglies just weren’t like the Race. They were always in a hurry.

  Their missile was in a hurry, too, chewing away the distance to the grounded ships. Breltan’s jaws opened again, this time in amusement. So the Tosevites had discovered missiles, had they? Well and good, but they hadn’t yet discovered that missiles too could be killed.

  No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than the radars showed missiles leaping up to smash the intruder. Breltan laughed again, said, “You’ll have to do better than that, Big Uglies.”

  A missile, as a rule, is a flimsy thing, no stronger than it has to be-any excess weight degrades performance. If another missile-or even a fragment hurled from an exploding warhead-hits it, odds are it will be wrecked.

  The shell from Dora, however, had to be armored to withstand the monstrous force that had sent it on its way. A missile exploded a couple of meters from it. The fragments bounced off its brass sides. Another missile struck it a glancing blow before exploding and spun away, ruined.

  The shell, undisturbed, flew on.

  Breltan watched the radar screen in disbelief mixed with equal measures of horror and fascination. “It can’t do that,” he said. But it could-the Tosevite missile shrugged off everything the Race threw at it and kept coming. Coming right at Breltan.

  “Emperor save me,” he whimpered, and dove under his seat in the approved position for protection against attack from the air.

  The shell landed about ten meters in front of the 67th Emperor Sohrheb. Just under a tonne of its mass was high explosives. The rest, in a time measured in microseconds, turned to knife-edged, red-hot fragments of every shape and size.

  Like all starships of the invasion fleet, the 67th Emperor Sohrheb drew its primary power from an atomic pile. But, like most of the ships that landed on Tosev 3, it used a fair part of the energy from that pile to electrolyze water into oxygen and the hydrogen that fueled the Race’s air and ground vehicles.

  When it blew, it blew sky-high. No one ever found a trace of Breltan-or his seat.

  The fireball was big enough to be visible across sixty kilometers. When it lit up the northern horizon, the men of Heavy Artillery Battalion Dora screamed with: delight, loud enough for Karl Becker to hear them even with his abused ears. “Hit! Hit! Hit!” he shouted, and danced in a clumsy circle with Michael Arenswald.

  “Now that’s what I call an orgasm,” Arenswald yelled.

  The brigadier commanding the heavy artillery battalion climbed up onto the immense gun carriage, megaphone in hand. “Back to it!” he bawled to his capering crew. “We want to hit them again before they hit us.”

  Nothing could have been better calculated to send the battalion back to work at full speed. Unlike a tank gun, Dora could not traverse. A locomotive attached to the front end of the carriage moved forward a few meters, pulling nearly 1,500 tonnes of cannon and mounting along the curved track into its preplanned next firing position.

  Even as the flagman brought the engine to a halt right at the mark painted on the track, Becker was dashing forward to make sure the gun carnage had remained level after the stress of the round and the move. The bubbles in the spirit levels at all four corners of the carriage hadn’t stirred a millimeter. He waved up to the reloading gang. “All good here!”

  The long barrel lifted a degree or two. A crane was already lifting the expended shell casing out Of the breech. “Clear be-low!” the crane operator shouted. Men scattered. The casing thudded to the ground beside the gun carriage. That wasn’t the way the manuals said to get rid of such casings, but it was the fastest way. The crane swung to pick up a new shell.

  Karl Becker kept an eye on his watch. Twenty-nine minutes after Dora spoke for the first time, the great gun spoke again.

  Krefak felt the heat from the burning 67th Emperor Sohrheb, though his missile battery was posted a good ways away from the luckless starship. He was heartily glad of that; the blast when the ship went up had taken out several units closer to it.

  Krefak also felt the heat from his own commander, who’d waxed eloquent over his failure to shoot down, the Big Uglies’ missile. He’d done everything right; he knew he had. The battery had intercepted the Tosevite projectile at least twice. Tapes from the radars proved it. But how was he supposed to say so, with only smoking rubble left where a proud starship had stood mere heartbeats before?

  One of the males at a radar screen let out a frightened hiss. “The eggless creatures launched another one!” he exclaimed.

  Krefak gaped in shocked surprise. Once was catastrophe enough, but twice-He couldn’t imagine twice. He didn’t want to imagine twice. His voice rose to a most-unofficerlike screech:

  “Shoot it down!”

  Roars from the launchers showed him that the computers hadn’t waited for his orders. He ran, to the screen, watched the missiles fly. As they had before, they went straight to the mark, exploded… and were gone. So far as the Tosevite missile was concerned, they might as well never have been fired. It proceeded inexorably on its ordained course.

  Below the radar screen that marked its track through the air was another that evaluated the ground target at which it was aimed. “No,” he said softly. “By the Emperors, launch more missiles!”

  “The battery has expended all the ones we had on launchers, superior sir,” the male answered helplessly. “More are coming.” Then he too took a look at where the Tosevite missile was heading. “Not the 56th Emperor Jossano.” His eye turrets quivered with fright as he stared at Krefak.

  “Yes, with most of our nuclear weapons on board. To treachery with colonizing this stinking planet; we should have sterilized it to be rid of the Tosevites once and for all. We-” His voice was lost in the roar of the exploding missile, and in the much, much bigger roar that subsumed it.

  The 56th Emperor Jossano went up in the same sort of blast as had taken the 67th Emperor Sohrheb. The fission and fusion weapons were stored in the very heart of the ship, in a strongly armored chamber. It did not save them. As the 56th Emperor Jossano blew to pieces and burned, the explosives that triggered the rapid joining of precisely machined chunks of plutonium began going off, as if they were rounds of ammunition in a flaming tank.

  The bombs themselves did not go off; the triggering charges did not ignite in the precise order or at the precise rate that required. But the casings were wrecked, the chunks of plutonium warped out of shape and broken and, indeed, scattered over a goodly part of the Tosevite landscape as explosion after explosion wracked the 56th Emperor Jossano.

  They were very likely the most valuable pieces of metal on the face of the Earth, or would have been had any human being known they were there or what to do with them. No human being did, not then.

  More screams of glee rose from Dora’s firing crew. They did not waste motion dancing at the sight of this new flame on the distant horizon, but immediately set to work reloading the 80-centimeter cannon.

  Michael Arenswald bellowed in Becker’s ear. “Six! Didn’t I tell you we’d get off six?”

  “We’ve been lucky twice,” Becker said. “That’s more than I expected right there. Maybe we’ll go again-third time’s the charm, they say.”

  For an instant too long, he thought the scream in the sky was part of the way his head rang after the second detonation of the monster gun. The locomotive had just finished hauling Dora to its next marked firing position. Becker started over to the gun carriage to see if it had stayed level yet again.

  The first bomb blast, a few meters behind him, hurled him facefirst into that great mountain of metal. He felt things break-his nose, a cheekbone, several ribs, a hip. He opened his mouth to scream. Another bomb went off, this one even closer.

  Jens Larssen’s apartment lay a few blocks west of the Union Stockyards. The neighborhood wasn’t much, but he’d still been surprised at how cheap he got the place. The incessant Chicago wind came
from the west that day. A couple of days later, it started blowing off Lake Michigan, and he understood. But it was too late by then-he’d already signed the lease.

  The wind blew off the lake the day his wife, Barbara, got into town, too. He still remembered the way her eyes got wide. She put the smell into one raised eyebrow and four words: “Essence of terrified cow.”

  The wind was blowing off the lake tonight, but Larssen hardly noticed the rich manure stink. He could smell his own fear, and Barbara’s. Lizard planes were over Chicago again. He’d listened to Edward R. Marrow on crackling shortwave from England, listened to that deep, raspy voice and its trademark opening: “This is London.” Such was Murrow’s magic that he’d imagined he understood what being a Londoner in the Blitz was like. Now he knew better.

  More planes screeched past; more bombs fell, some, by the way the windows rattled, quite close by. He clung to Barbara, and she to him, under the kitchen table. Chicago had no shelters. “Hitting the stockyards again,” she said into his ear.

  He nodded. “Anything with rails.” The Lizards were inhumanly methodical about pasting transportation hubs, and Chicago was nothing else but. It was also close to the landing zone they’d carved out for themselves in downstate Illinois, Missouri, and Kentucky. Thanks to both those things, the town was taking a heavy pounding.

  Only a couple of candles lit the one-bedroom apartment. Their light did not get past the blankets tacked up to serve as blackout curtains. The blankets would not have contained electric lights, but the power had been off more often than it was on the past few days. It made Larssen glad for once that he had only an old-fashioned icebox; not a fancy electric refrigerator. As long as the ice man kept coming around-as long as the ice man still had ice-his food would stay fresh.

  Antiaircraft guns, pitifully few and pitifully ineffective, added their barks to the cacophony. Shrapnel pattered down on rooftops like hot metal hail. Air-raid sirens wailed, lost souls in the night.