Worldwar: Upsetting the Balance Read online

  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.”

  “We caught plenty of you Pole bastards, too,” someone behind them said in German. They both whirled. Friedrich sneered at them. “Poles and Jews talk too fucking much.”

  “That’s because we have Germans to talk about,” Anielewicz retorted. He hated the arrogant way Friedrich stood there, feet planted on the ground as if he’d sprung from it, every line of his body proclaiming that he thought himself a lord of creation, just as if it had been the winter of 1941, with the Lizards nowhere to be seen and the Nazis bestriding Europe like a colossus and driving hard on Moscow.

  The German glared at him. “You’ve got smart answers for everything, don’t you?” he said. Anielewicz tensed. A couple of more words to Friedrich and somebody was liable to die right there; he resolved he wouldn’t be the one. But then the Nazi went on, “Well, that’s just like a Jew. You’re right about one thing—we’d better get out of here. Come on.”

  They headed east down a game track Mordechai never would have noticed for himself. Just as if they were raiding rather than running, Jerzy took the point and Friedrich the rear, leaving Anielewicz to move along in the middle, making enough noise to impersonate a large band of men.

  Friedrich said, “This partisan business stinks.” Then he laughed softly. “Course, I don’t remember hunting you bastards was a whole lot of fun, either.”

  “Hunting us bastards,” Mordechai corrected him. “Remember which side you’re on now.” Having someone along who’d been on both sides could be useful. Anielewicz had theoretical knowledge of how partisan hunters had operated. Friedrich had done it. If only he weren’t Friedrich . . .

  Up ahead a few meters, Jerzy let out a hiss. “Hold up,” he said. “We’re coming to a road.”

  Mordechai stopped. He didn’t hear Friedrich behind him, so he assumed Friedrich stopped, too. He wouldn’t have sworn to it, though; he hadn’t heard Friedrich when they were moving, either.

  Jerzy said, “Come on up. I don’t see anything. We’ll cross one at a time.”

  Anielewicz moved up to him as quietly as he could. Sure enough, Friedrich was right behind him. Jerzy peered cautiously from behind a birch, then sprinted across the rutted, muddy dirt road and dove into the brush there. Mordechai waited a few seconds to make sure nothing untoward happened, then made the same dash and dive himself. Somehow Jerzy had done it silently, but the plants he dove into rustled and crackled in the most alarming way. His pique at himself only got worse when Friedrich, who would have made two of him, also crossed without producing any noise.

  Jerzy cast about for the game trail, found it, and headed east once more. He said, “We want to get as far away from the fighting as we can. I don’t know, but—”

  “You feel it, too, eh?” Friedrich said. “Like somebody just walked over your grave? I don’t know what it is, but I don’t like it. What about you, Shmuel?”

  “No, not this time,” Anielewicz admitted. He didn’t trust his own instincts, though, not here. In the ghetto, he’d had a fine-tuned sense of when trouble was c
oming. He didn’t have a feel for the forest, and he knew it.

  “Something—” Jerzy muttered, just before the shooting started. The Lizards were ahead of them and off to one flank. At the first gunshot, Mordechai threw himself flat. He heard a grunt and a groan from in front of him. He groaned, too—Jerzy was hit.

  In Lizard-accented Polish, a tremendously amplified voice roared, “You have been tracked since you crossed the road. Surrender or be killed. You cannot escape. We shall cease fire to allow you to surrender. If you do not, you will die.”

  As promised, the hail of bullets stopped. By the noises in the trees, more Lizards were moving up on the side opposite the one from which the shooting had come. A helicopter thrummed overhead, sometimes visible through the leafy forest canopy, sometimes not.

  Anielewicz weighed the odds. The Lizards didn’t know who he was. That counted for a great deal—what they didn’t know he knew, they couldn’t squeeze out of him. Wearily, he set down his Mauser and got to his feet, arms high over his head.

  Five or ten meters behind him, Friedrich was doing the same thing. The German managed a wry grin. “Maybe we’ll get away, eh?”

  “That would be good,” Anielewicz agreed. He’d managed to arrange it for other people (he wondered how Moishe Russie was getting along these days), and he’d managed to slip out of Warsaw right under the Lizards’ snouts. Whether he could get out of a prison camp once he was inside it was another question, though.

  And it was going to be one he’d have to answer. Several Lizards, all of them with automatic rifles at the ready, approached him and Friedrich. He stood very still, not wanting to spook them and get himself shot. One of the Lizards gestured sharply with the barrel of his gun—this way. “Go!” he said in barely understandable Polish. Anielewicz and Friedrich shambled into captivity.

  Rance Auerbach and his troopers rode into Lamar, Colorado, after another hit-and-run raid into Lizard-held Kansas. A couple of horses had bodies tied across their backs; nothing came easy when you fought the Lizards. But the company had done what it set out to do.

  Auerbach turned to Bill Magruder. “Old Joe Selig won’t play footsie with the Lizards any more.”

  “Sir, that’s a fact, and a good thing, too,” Magruder answered. His face was soot-grimy; he’d been one of the band that had torched Selig’s barn. The rest of the company had burned Selig’s farmhouse, and Selig inside it. Magruder leaned down and spat right in the middle of Main Street. “Goddamn collaborator. I never thought we’d see bastards like that, not in the United States.”

  “Me, neither,” Auerbach said glumly. “Just goes to show there’s some bastards everywhere, I guess. Hate to say it—hate to see it, by God—but I reckon it’s true.”

  Near the railroad station, right where Main Street crossed the Santa Fe tracks, stood the Madonna of the Trail monument, dedicated to all the pioneer mothers. Too bad some of those pioneer mothers had snakes in the grass for grandchildren.

  A pigeon flew overhead, making a beeline for the county courthouse. Auerbach spotted the little aluminum tube fastened to its left leg. Spying it took some of the bitter taste out of his mouth. “I’d like to see the Lizards figure out a way to jam that,” he said.

  Magruder hadn’t noticed the bird, but he figured out what the captain had to be talking about. “Homing pigeon, was it?” he said. At Auerbach’s nod, he went on, “Yeah, as long as we stick to the nineteenth century, the Lizards don’t have a clue about what we’re doing. Only trouble is, when we get up to the here and now, we get licked.”

  “Isn’t it the truth?” Auerbach said ruefully. “And if we have the nineteenth-century stuff and they have the twentieth and the Buck Rogers gadgets, too, we’re going to keep right on getting licked unless we’re a damn sight smarter than we’ve been so far.” The beginning of an idea flickered across his mind, but was gone before he could capture it.

  Before the war, Lamar had been a medium-sized town: four thousand people, maybe a few more. Unlike a lot of places, it was bigger now. A lot of the original inhabitants were dead or fled, but soldiers made up for a good many of them because it was an important forward base against the Lizards. And, because it remained firmly in American hands, it was a magnet for refugees from farther east.

  Army headquarters was in the First National Bank building, not far from the courthouse (not that Lamar was a big enough town for anything to be real far from anything else). Auerbach dismissed his troopers to see to their horses, then went in to report.

  Colonel Morton Nordenskold, the local commander, heard him out and made encouraging noises. “Well done,” he said. “Traitors need to know they’ll pay for treason.” Nordenskold had to be from somewhere in the upper Midwest; his voice held a trace of singsong Scandinavian intonation.

  “Yes, sir.” Auerbach felt his own Texas drawl coming out more strongly in reaction to that very northern accent. “What are your orders for the company now, sir?”

  “As usual,” Nordenskold answered: “Observe, patrol, raid. Given what we have, what else can we do?”

  “Nothing much I can see, sir,” Auerbach said. “Uh, sir, what do we do if the Lizards push west with armor, the way they did last summer to get into Kansas? I’m proud to be a cavalryman—don’t get me wrong—but you go with horses against tanks once and you won’t do it again with the same horses. Probably not with the same men, either.”

  “I know.” Nordenskold wore a small, precise gray mustache—too small and precise to fluff out when he sighed. “Captain, we’ll do the best we can under the circumstances: we’ll harass, we’ll counterattack when we can . . .” He sighed again. “Take away the Army guff, and a lot of us are going to get killed trying to hold them back. Any further questions, Auerbach?”

  “Uh, no, sir,” Rance answered. Nordenskold had been more forthright than he’d expected. Things weren’t good, and they weren’t likely to get better any time soon. He’d known that, but having his superior come right out and say it made it feel as real and immediate as a kick in the teeth.

  “Dismissed, then,” the colonel said. His desk was piled high with papers, some of them reports and notes handwritten on the backs of old bank forms. He bent to them once more before Auerbach was out of the office.

  Without electric lights, the room where First National Bank customers would have stood was dark and gloomy. Rance blinked several times when he went out into the bright sunshine of the street. Then he blinked again, and touched the brim of his cap with a forefinger in what was more a polite gesture than a salute. “Hello, Miss Penny. How are you today?”

  “I’m all right, I suppose,” Penny Summers answered indifferently. She’d been like that ever since Auerbach had brought her back to Lamar from Lakin, Kansas. Nothing seemed to matter much to her. He understood that; watching your father smashed to cat meat right before your eyes was plenty to leave you stunned for a while.

  “You look mighty nice,” he offered gallantly. She was a nice-looking girl, true, but that wasn’t the same thing. Her face still had a wounded look to it and, like a lot of faces in Lamar, was none too clean. She still wore the overalls she’d had on when she and her father decided to pitch in and help the cavalry against the Lizards in Lakin. Under them she had on a man’s shirt that had seen better years—maybe better decades—and was also several sizes too big for her.

  She shrugged, not because she didn’t believe him, he judged, but because she didn’t care one way or the other.

  He tried again: “The folks you’re staying with here, are they treating you okay?”

  “I guess so,” she said, still so flat that he started to give up hope of bringing her back into full contact with the world. But then her voice picked up a little as she went on, “Mr. Purdy, he tried peekin’ at me when I got undressed one night, but I told him I was your girlfriend and you’d whale the stuffing out of him if he ever did it again.”

  “I ought to whale the stuffing out of him for doing it once,” Auerbach growled; he had definite, even veheme
nt, notions about what you should and shouldn’t do. Taking advantage of somebody you were supposed to be helping fell with a thud into the second category.

  “I told him I’d tell his wife on him, too,” Penny said. Was that amusement in her voice? Auerbach wasn’t sure, but it was something, and he hadn’t heard anything there since the Lizard plane swooped low over her father.

  He decided to risk laughing. “That was a good idea,” he said. Then he asked, “Why did you say you were my girlfriend? Not that I wouldn’t like it if it were so, mind you, but—”

  “On account of Mr. Purdy knows you brought me here, and he knows you’re half his age and twice his size,” Penny Summers answered. If she noticed the last sentence he’d politely tacked on, she didn’t show it.

  He sighed. He wished he could do something for her, but had no idea what that something might be. When he said good-bye, Penny only nodded and went on down the street. He didn’t think she was going anywhere in particular, just wandering around—maybe she and the Purdys got on one another’s nerves in ways other than the one she’d mentioned, too.

  He turned a corner and headed for the stables (funny to think of towns having stables again; they’d been going out of business since about the time he was born) to see to his horse: if you didn’t worry about your animal before you worried about yourself, you didn’t belong in the cavalry.

  Somebody sang out, “Hello, Captain Rance, sir!”

  Auerbach whirled. Only one person called him Captain Rance. To his men, he was Captain Auerbach. To his friends, he was just Rance—or rather, he’d been just Rance; the people he’d called friends were a lot of duty stations away from Lamar, Colorado. Sure enough, there stood Rachel Hines, grinning at him. He grinned back. “Hello yourself.”