Upsetting the Balance w-3 Read online

  When she came out of the tunnels, she blinked like a mole suddenly in daylight as she replaced the grass-covered netting that concealed the entrance. As Colonel Karpov had said, a high-wheeledpanje wagon waited there, the driver in the baggy blouse, trousers, and boots of themuzhik, the horse making the most of the moment by pulling up weeds.

  The wagon carried a load of straw. When Georg Schultz sat up in it, he looked like a scarecrow, although Ludmila had never seen a scarecrow with a coppery beard. He was dressed in his oldWehrmacht tunic and Red Army trousers; he didn’t have any civilian clothes this side of wherever in Germany he came from.

  He grinned at her. “Come on back here with me,liebchen,” he said in his mixture of Russian and German.

  “One minute.” She rummaged in her pack until she found the Tokarev automatic pistol. She belted it on, then climbed into the wagon. “You never listen to me when I tell you to keep your hands where they belong. Maybe you will listen to this.”

  “Maybe.” He was still grinning. He’d faced worse things than pistols. “And maybe not.”

  The driver twitched the reins. The horse let out a resentful snort, raised its head, and ambled off toward Moscow. The driver whistled something from Mussorgsky-after a moment, Ludmila recognized it as “The Great Gate of Kiev.” She smiled at the reference, no matter how oblique, to her hometown. But the smile quickly faded. Kiev had passed from the Nazis’ hands straight into those of the Lizards.

  Although they moved ever farther from the front line, the countryside showed the scars of war. Bombs had cratered the dirt road that ran northeast toward Moscow; every couple of hundred meters, it seemed, thepanje wagon had to rattle off onto the verge.

  Georg Schultz sat up again, spilling straw in all directions. “These stinking dirt roads played hell with us, all through Russia. The map would say we were coming up to a highway, and it’d either be dust and dirt like this or mud when it rained. Didn’t seem fair. You damn Russians were so backwards, it ended up helping you.”

  The driver didn’t move a muscle; he just kept driving. In spite of that, Ludmila would have bet he knew German. If he was from the NKVD, he’d have more talents than his rough-hewn exterior revealed.

  Every so often, they’d pass the dead carcasses of tanks rocketed from the air by the Lizards before they ever reached the front. Some had been there long enough to start rusting. Most had their engine compartments and turret hatches open: the Soviets had salvaged whatever they could from the wreckage.

  Even as scrap metal, the T-34s looked formidable. Pointing to one, Ludmila asked with no small pride, “And what did you think of those when you were up against them, Comrade Panzer Gunner?”

  “Nasty buggers,” Schultz answered promptly, ignoring the ironic form of address. “Good armor, good gun, good engine, good tracks-all better than anything we had, probably. The gunsight, not so good. Not the two-man turret, either-the commander’s too busy helping the gunner to command the panzer, and that’s his proper job. He should have a cupola, too. And you need more panzers with wireless sets. Not having them hurt your tactics, and they weren’t that great to begin with.”

  Now Ludmila hoped the driver was listening. She’d been aiming to twit the German tankman; she hadn’t expected such a serious, thoughtful answer. Being a Nazi didn’t automatically make a man a fool, no matter what propaganda claimed.

  The journey in to Moscow took two days. They spent the first night in a stand of trees well off the road. The Lizards still flew by at night, smashing up whatever they could find.

  Moscow, when they finally reached it, made Ludmila gasp in dismay. She’d last been there the winter before, after she’d flown Molotov to Germany. The Soviet capital had taken a beating then. Now…

  Now it seemed that every building possibly large enough to contain a factory had been pounded flat. A couple of the onion domes of the Kremlin and St. Basil’s had crumpled. Walls everywhere were streaked with soot; the faint odor of wet, stale smoke hung in the air.

  But people hadn’t given up.Babushkas sold apples and cabbages and beets on street corners. Soldiers carrying submachine guns tramped purposefully along. Horse-drawn wagons, some small like the one in which Ludmila rode, others pulled by straining teams, rattled and clattered. No guessing what they held, not with tarpaulins lashed down tight over their beds. If the Lizards couldn’t see what was in them, they wouldn’t know what to bomb. Flies droned around lumps of horse dung.

  The driver knew which bridge over the Moscow River was in good enough repair to get them up to the Kremlin, and which parts of the battered heart of Moscow-of the Soviet Union-were still beating. He pulled thepanje wagon up in front of one of those parts, stuck a feed bag on the horse’s head, and said, “I am to escort you to Colonel Lidov.” But for the snatches of whistling he’d let out from time to time, that was almost the first sound he’d made since he set out from the air base.

  Some of the walls in the corridor were cracked, but the electric lights worked. Off in the distance, a petrol-fired generator chugged away to keep the lightbulbs shining. “Wishwe had electricity,” Schultz muttered under his breath.

  The corridor was not the one down which Ludmila had gone on her earlier meeting with Boris Lidov; she wondered if that part of the Kremlin still stood. The wagon driver opened a door, peered inside, beckoned to her and to Georg Schultz. “He will see you.”

  Ludmila’s heart pounded in her chest, as if she were about to fly a combat mission. She knew she had reason to be nervous; the NKVD could kill you as readily, and with as little remorse, as the Germans or the Lizards. And Lidov had made plain what he thought of her after she got back from Germany. She might have gone to agulag then, rather than back to her unit.

  The NKVD colonel (Ludmila wondered if his promotion sprang from ability or simply survival) looked up from a paper-strewn desk. She started to report to him in proper military form, but Schultz beat her to the punch, saying breezily, “How goes it with you, Boris, you scrawny old prune-faced bastard?”

  Staring, Ludmila waited for the sky to fall. It wasn’t that the description didn’t fit; it did, like a glove. But to say what you thought of an NKVD colonel, right to his prune face… Maybe he didn’t follow German.

  He did. Fixing Schultz with a fishy stare, he answered in German much better than Ludmila’s: “Just because Otto Skorzeny could get away with speaking to me so, Sergeant, does not mean you can. He was more valuable than you are, and he was not under Soviet discipline. You, on the other hand-” He let that hang, perhaps to give Schultz the chance to paint horrid pictures in his own mind.

  It didn’t work. Schultz said, “Listen, I was one of the men you sent on the raid that gave you people the metal for your bomb. If that doesn’t buy me the right to speak my mind, what does?”

  “Nothing,” Lidov said coldly.

  Ludmila spoke up before Schultz got himself shot or sent to a camp, and her along with him: “Comrade Colonel, for what mission have you summoned the two of us away from the front line?”

  Lidov’s look suggested he’d forgotten she was there, and utterly forgotten he’d ordered the two of them to Moscow for any specific reason. After a moment, he collected himself and even laughed a little. That amazed Ludmila, who hadn’t suspected he could. Then he explained, “Curiously enough, it has to do with Soviet-German friendship and cooperation.” He’d answered Ludmila in Russian; he translated the reply into German for Schultz’s benefit.

  The panzer gunner laughed, too. “Till the Lizards came, I was giving you cooperation, all right, fifty millimeters at a time.”

  “What are we to do, Comrade Colonel?” Ludmila asked hastily. Lidov had warned Georg Schultz twice. Even once would have been surprising. Thinking he’d forbear three times running was asking for a miracle, and Ludmila, a good product of the Soviet educational system, did not believe in miracles.

  Lidov’s chair squeaked as he turned in it to point to a map pinned to the rough plaster on the side of the wall. “Here by the lake
-do you see it? — is the city of Pskov. It is still in the hands of mankind, although threatened by the Lizards. Some of the defenders areWehrmacht troops, others partisan members of the Red Army.” He paused and pursed his lips. “Some friction in the defense has resulted from this.”

  “You mean they’re shooting at each other, don’t you?” Schultz asked. Ludmila had wondered if he was too naive to see what lay beneath propaganda, but he proved he wasn’t. Gobbels probably used the same techniques as his Soviet counterparts, which would have sensitized Schultz to them.

  “Not at present,” Lidov said primly. “Nonetheless, examples of cooperation might prove to have a valuable effect there. The two of you have done an admirable job of working together, by all the reports that have reached me.”

  “We haven’t worked together all that close,” Schultz said with a sidelong glance at Ludmila. “Not as close as I’d like.”

  She wanted to kick him right where it would do the most good. “By which you mean I don’t care to be your whore,” she snarled. Before she said something worse to him, something irremediable, she turned to Boris Lidov. “Comrade Colonel, how are we to get to Pskov?”

  “I could have you sent by train,” Lidov answered. “North of Moscow, rail service works fairly well. But instead, I have a U-2 waiting at a field not far from here. The aircraft itself will prove useful in defending Pskov, as will the addition of a pilot and a skilled mechanic who can also serve a gun. Now go-you spent too much time getting here, but I was unwilling to detach a plane from frontline service.”

  Ludmila was unsurprised to find the driver waiting for them when they left Colonel Lidov’s office. The driver said, “I will take you to the airport now.”

  Georg Schultz scrambled up into thepanjewagon. He reached out a hand to help Ludmila join him and laughed when she ignored it, as if she’d done something funny. Once more she felt like kicking him. Being sent to Pskov was one thing. Being sent there in the company of this smirking, lecherous lout was something else again.

  She brightened for a moment: at least she would be escaping Nikifor Sholudenko. And-exquisite irony! — maybe his reports on her had helped make that possible. But her glee quickly faded. For every Sholudenko she escaped, she was only too likely to find another one. His kind was a hardy breed-like any other cockroaches,she thought.

  Atvar nervously pondered the map that showed the progress of the Race’s invasion of Britain. In one respect, all was well: the British could not stop the thrusts of his armored columns. In another respect, though, the picture was not as bright: the Race’s armor controlled only the ground on which it sat at the moment. Territory where it had been but was no longer seethed with rebellion the moment the landcruisers were out of sight.

  “The trouble with this cursed island,” he said, jabbing a fingerclaw at the computer display as if it were actually the territory in question, “is that it’s too small and too tightly packed with Tosevites. Fighting there is like trying to hold a longball game in an airlock.”

  “Well put, Exalted Fleetlord.” Kirel let his mouth fall open in an appreciative chuckle. Atvar studied the map with one eye and the shiplord with the other. He still mistrusted Kirel. A properly loyal subordinate would have played no role in the effort to oust him. Yes, next to Straha, Kirel was a paragon of virtue, but that was not saying enough to leave the fleetlord comfortable.

  Atvar said, “The cost in equipment and males for territory gained is running far higher than the computer projections. We’ve lost several heavy transports, and we cannot afford that at all. Without the transport fleet, we’ll have to use starships to move landcruisers about-and that would leave them vulnerable to the maniacal Tosevites.”

  “Truth, Exalted Fleetlord.” Kirel hesitated, then went on, “At best, computer projections gave us less than a fifty percent chance of succeeding in the conquest of Britain if the campaign in the SSSR was not satisfactorily concluded first.”

  Kirel remained unfailingly polite, but Atvar was not in the mood for criticism. “The computer’s reasoning was based on our ability to shift resources from the SSSR after we conquered it,” he snapped. “True, we did not conquer it, but we have shifted resources-after the Soviets exploded that atomic bomb, we’ve scaled back operations in their territory. This produces something of the effect the computer envisioned, even if by a different route.”

  “Yes, Exalted Fleetlord.” If Kirel was convinced, he did a good job of hiding it. He changed the subject, but not to one more reassuring: “We are down to our last hundred antimissiles, Exalted Fleetlord.”

  “That is not good,” Atvar said, an understatement that would do until a bigger one came along, which wouldn’t be any time soon. As was his way, he did his best to look on the bright side of things: “At least we can concentrate those missiles against Deutschland, the only Tosevite empire exploring that technology at the moment.”

  “You are of course correct,” Kirel said. Then he and the fleetlord stopped and looked at each other in mutual consternation-and understanding. With the Race, saying something was not happening at the moment meant it would not happen, certainly not in a future near enough to require worry. With the Big Uglies, it meant what it said and nothing more: it was no guarantee that the Americans or the Russkis or the Nipponese or even the British wouldn’t start lobbing guided missiles at the Race tomorrow or the day after. Even more unnerving, both males had come to take that possibility for granted. With the Tosevites, you couldn’t tell.

  Kirel tried again: “We continue to expend the antimissile missiles at a rate of several per day. We also seek to destroy the launchers from which the Deutsch missiles come, but we have had only limited success there, as they are both mobile and easy to conceal.”

  “Any success on Tosev 3 seems limited,” Atvar said with a sigh. “We might do better to blast the factories in which the missiles are manufactured. If the Deutsche cannot produce them, they cannot fire them. And missiles require great precision; if we destroy the tools needed to make them, the Big Uglies will be a long while coming up with more.” He realized he was once more reduced to buying time against the Tosevites, but that was better than losing to them.

  “This course is also being attempted,” Kirel said, “but, while it pains me to contradict the exalted fleetlord, the Tosevite missiles are astonishingly crude. Their guidance is so bad as to make them no more than area weapons, extremely long-range artillery, but the prospect of large weights of high explosive landing behind our lines remains unpleasant; some have evaded our countermeasures and done considerable damage, and that situation will grow far worse as we run out of countermissiles. The corresponding point is that they are far easier to build than the missiles that shoot them down. We attack factories we’ve identified as producing missile components, but the Deutsche continue to produce and launch the pestilential things.”

  Atvar sighed again. There in an eggshell was the story of the war against the Big Uglies. The Race took all the proper steps to contain them-and got hurt anyhow.

  A screen on his desk lit up, showing the features of his adjutant, Pshing. Atvar immediately started to worry. Pshing wouldn’t interrupt his conference with Kirel for anything that wasn’t important, which meant, in practice, for anything that hadn’t gone wrong. “What is it?” Atvar demanded, putting a fierce snarl into the interrogative cough.

  “Forgive me for troubling you, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing said nervously, “but Fzzek, commander of invasion forces in Britain, has received under sign of truce a disturbing message from Churchill, the chief minister to the petty emperor of Britain. He requests your orders on how to proceed.”

  “Give me the message,” Atvar said.

  “It shall be done.” Pshing swung an eye turret to one side, evidently reading the words from another screen. “This Churchill demands that we begin evacuating our forces from Britain in no more than two days or face an unspecified type of warfare the Tosevites have not yet employed against us, but one which is asserted to be highly e
ffective and dangerous.”

  “If this Churchill uses nuclear arms against us, we shall not spare his capital,” Atvar said. “The island of Britain is so small, a few nuclear weapons would utterly ruin it.”

  “Exalted Fleetlord, Churchill specifically denies the weapons he describes are nuclear in nature,” Pshing replied. “They are new, they are deadly. Past that, the British spokesmale declined detailed comment.”

  “Having begun the conquest of Britain, we are not going to abandon it on the say-so of a Tosevite,” Atvar said. “You may tell Fzzek to relay that to Churchill. For all we know, the Big Ugly is but running an enormous bluff. We shall not allow ourselves to be deceived. Relay that to Fzzek as well.”

  “It shall be done,” Pshing said. The screen holding his image went blank.

  Atvar turned back to Kirel. “Sometimes the presumption Tosevites show astonishes me. They treat us as if we were fools. If they have a new weapon, which I doubt, advertising it will produce nothing from us, especially since we’ve seen for ourselves what liars they are.”

  “Exactly so, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said.

  Mutt Daniels crouched in ruins, hoping the Lizard bombardment would end soon. “If it don’t end soon, there ain’t gonna be nothin’ left of Chicago,” he muttered under his breath.

  “What’s that, Lieutenant?” Dracula Szabo asked from the shelter of a shell hole not far away.

  Before Mutt could answer, several Lizard shells came in, close enough to slam him down as if he’d been blocking the plate when a runner bowled him over trying to score. He thanked his lucky stars he’d been breathing out rather than in; a blast could rip your lungs to bits and kill you without leaving a mark on your body.

  “Come on,” he said, and charged west across the ruined lawn of Poro College toward the rubble that had been shops and apartments on the other side of South Park Way. Szabo followed at his heels.

  Somewhere close by, a Lizard opened up with an automatic rifle. Daniels didn’t know whether the bullets were intended for him, and didn’t wait to find out. He threw himself flat, ignoring the bricks and stones on which he landed. Bricks and stones could hurt his bones, but bullets… he shuddered, not caring for the parody on the old rhyme.