Striking the Balance Read online

  Now Kirel sighed. “Fighting on this world corrodes males’ moral fiber as badly as its ocean water corrodes equipment. We are not fighting the war that was planned before we set out from Home, and that by itself is plenty to disorient a good many males.”

  “This is also truth,” Atvar admitted. “The leader of the mutineers—a lowly landcruiser driver. If you can image such a thing—is shown to have lost at least three different sets of crewmales: two, including those with whom he served at this base, to Tosevite action, and the third grouping arrested and disciplined as ginger tasters.”

  “By his wild pronouncements, this Ussmak sounds like a ginger taster himself,” Kirel said.

  “Threatening to call in the Soviets to his aid if we attack him, you mean?” Atvar said. “We ought to take him up on that; if he thinks they would help him out of sheer benevolence, the Tosevite herb truly has addled his wits. If it weren’t for the equipment he could pass on to the SSSR, I would say we should welcome him to go over to that set of Big Uglies.”

  “Given the situation as it actually is, Exalted Fleetlord, what course shall we pursue?” Kirel’s interrogative cough sounded vaguely accusing—or maybe Atvar’s conscience was twisting his hearing diaphragms.

  “I don’t know yet,” the fleetlord said unhappily. When in doubt, his first instinct—typical for a male—was to do nothing. Letting the situation come nearer to hatching so you could understand it more fully worked well on Home, and also on Rabotev 2 and Halless 1, the other inhabited worlds the Race controlled.

  But waiting, against the Tosevites, often proved even worse than proceeding on incomplete knowledge. The Big Uglies did things. They didn’t fret about long-term consequences. Take atomic weapons—those helped them in the short run. If they devastated Tosev 3 in the process—well, so what?

  Atvar couldn’t leave it at so what. The colonization fleet was on the way from Home. He couldn’t very well present it with a world he’d rendered uninhabitable in the process of overcoming the Big Uglies. Yet he couldn’t fail to respond, either, and so found himself in the unpleasant position of reacting to what the Tosevites did instead of making them react to him.

  The mutineers had no nuclear weapons, and weren’t Big Uglies. He could have afforded to wait them out . . . If they hadn’t threatened to yield their base to the SSSR. With the Tosevites involved, you couldn’t just sit and watch. The Big Uglies were never content to let things simmer. They threw them in a microwave oven and brought them to a boil as fast as they could.

  When Atvar didn’t say anything more, Kirel tried to prod him: “Exalted Fleetlord, you can’t be contemplating genuine negotiations with these rebellious—and revolting—males? Their demands are impossible: not just amnesty and transfer to a warmer climate—those would be bad enough by themselves—but also ending the struggle against the Tosevites so no more males die ‘uselessly,’ to use their word.”

  “No, we cannot allow mutineers to dictate terms to us,” Atvar agreed. “That would be intolerable.” His mouth fell open in a bitter laugh. “Then again, by all reasonable standards, the situation over vast stretches of Tosev 3 is intolerable, and our forces seem to lack the ability to improve it to any substantial extent. What does this suggest to you, Shiplord?”

  One possible answer was, a new fleetlord. The assembled shiplords of the conquest fleet had tried to remove Atvar once, after the SSSR detonated the first Tosevite fission bomb, and had narrowly failed. If they tried again, Kirel was the logical male to succeed Atvar. The fleetlord waited for his subordinate’s reply, not so much for what he said as for how he said it.

  Slowly, Kirel answered, “Were the Tosevites factions of the Race opposed to the general will—not that the Race would generate such vicious factions, of course, but speaking for the sake of the hypothesis—their strength, unlike that of the mutineers, might come close to making negotiations with them mandatory.”

  Atvar contemplated that. Kirel was, generally speaking, a conservative male, and had couched his suggestion conservatively by equating the Big Uglies with analogous groupings within the Race, an equation that in itself made Atvar’s scales itch. But the suggestion, however couched, was more radical than any Straha, the shiplord who’d led the effort to oust Atvar, had ever put forward before deserting and fleeing to the Big Uglies.

  “Shiplord,” Atvar demanded sharply, “are you making the same proposal as the mutineers: that we discuss with the Tosevites ways of ending our campaign short of complete conquest?”

  “Exalted Fleetlord, did you yourself not say our males seem incapable of effecting a complete conquest of Tosev 3?” Kirel answered, still with perfect subordination but not abandoning his own ideas, either. “If that be so, should we not either destroy the planet to make sure the Tosevites can never threaten us, or else—” He stopped; unlike Straha, he had a sense of when he was going too far for Atvar to tolerate.

  “No,” the fleetlord said, “I refuse to concede that the commands of the Emperor cannot be carried out in full. We shall defend ourselves in the northern portion of the planet until its dreadful winter weather improves, then resume the offensive against the Big Uglies. Tosev 3 shall be ours.”

  Kirel crouched into the Race’s pose of obedience. “It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord.”

  Again, the response was perfectly subordinate. Kirel did not ask how it should be done. The Race had brought only so much matériel from Home. It was of far higher quality than anything the Tosevites used, but there was only a limited quantity of it. Try as they would, the Race’s pilots and missile batteries and artillery had not managed to knock out the Big Uglies’ manufacturing capacity. The armaments they produced, though better than those they’d had when the Race first landed on Tosev 3, remained inferior . . . but they kept on making them.

  Some munitions could be produced in factories captured from the Tosevites, and the Race’s starships had their own manufacturing capacity that would have been signflicant . . . in a smaller war. When added to what the logistics vessels had brought from Home, that still left the hope of adequacy for the coming campaign . . . and the Big Uglies were also in distress, no doubt about that. Victory might yet come.

  Or, of course . . . but Atvar did not care to think about that.

  Even under a flag of truce, Mordechai Anielewicz felt nervous about approaching the German encampment. After starving in the Warsaw ghetto, after leading the Jewish fighters of Warsaw who’d risen against the Nazis and helped the Lizards drive them out of the city, he was under no illusions about what Hitler’s forces wanted for his people: they wanted them to vanish from the face of the earth.

  But the Lizards wanted to enslave everybody, Jews and goyim alike. The Jews hadn’t fully realized that when they rose against the Nazis. Had they, it wouldn’t have mattered much. Measured against extermination, enslavement looked good.

  The Germans were still fighting the Lizards, and fighting hard. No one denied their military prowess, or their technical skill. From afar, Anielewicz had seen the nuclear bomb they’d touched off east of Breslau. Had he seen it close up, he wouldn’t be coming here to dicker with the Nazis.

  “Halt!” The voice might have come out of thin air. Mordechai halted. After a moment, a German wearing a white camouflage smock and a whitewashed helmet appeared as if by magic from behind a tree. Just looking at him made Anielewicz, who had Red Army valenki on his feet and was dressed in Polish Army trousers, a Wehrmacht tunic, a Red Army fur hat, and a sheepskin jacket of civilian origin, feel like a refugee from a rummage sale. He needed a shave, too, which added to his air of seediness. The German’s lip curled. “You are the Jew we were told to expect?”

  “No, I’m St. Nicholas, here late for Christmas.” Anielewicz, who had been an engineering student before the war, had learned fluent standard German. He spoke Yiddish now, to annoy the sentry.

  The fellow just grunted. Maybe he didn’t think the joke was funny. Maybe he hadn’t got it. He gestured with his Mauser. “You will come with me. I w
ill take you to the colonel.”

  That was what Anielewicz was there for, but he didn’t like the way the sentry said it even so. The German spoke as if the universe permitted no other possible outcome. Maybe it didn’t. Mordechai followed him through the cold and silent woods.

  “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 Mor
dechai into camp shift his Gewehr98 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.”