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  “No, that’s not as bad as it seems,” the other panzergrenadier said. He was a little skinny fellow named Lothar Zimmer, and seemed to have been born without nerves. “There’s a big vehicle park north of here, and most of the crews are trying to get their machines serviced. The fellows you see here are just the orphans, the ones who had theirs blown out from under them.”

  “That’s a relief, anyhow. I was beginning to wonder if we had any armor left at all.”

  One thing the Germans knew almost instinctively was how to organize. Without that skill, the campaigns across the vast distances of European Russia would have been impossible to imagine, the more so as the Reds had more machines and far more men than did Germany or even Europe as a whole. Even with it, the tide was flowing west now, not east.

  Still, as he watched Dynamo Stadium fill, Sack had to believe Germany would hold the onrushing Communist hordes out of Europe. Each of the men here was worth two, three, four of his foes, thanks to the combination of discipline and initiative the German army had mastered better than any other. Given a spell to regroup and breathe a little behind the barrier of the Dnieper, they’d surely halt the Reds and keep most of what they’d won in these past bloody two and a half years.

  Yet no sooner had the sight of so many Germans sorting themselves out by unit boosted the lance-corporal’s confidence than whispers began running through that crowd of soldiers. Sack could almost watch them spread by the way the men turned toward each other like so many stalks of wheat bending in the breeze. Where the whispers had passed, silence lay heavy.

  They came piecemeal to the Forty-First Panzergrenadiers, a word here, a word there: balkas (the gullies that crisscrossed the country on both sides of the Dnieper), helicopters, Reds. By now, Sack had had a lot of practice at joining a word here with a word there and making a whole rumor of it. “They’ve crossed the river,” he said. He sounded almost as stunned as Wachtmeister Pfeil had after the shell fragment laid open his leg.

  Another word came: bridgehead. Then another: breakthrough. Lothar Zimmer could paste them together, too. “If they break through here, where do we stop them next?” he said. No one answered him.

  The stadium loudspeakers began to bellow, ordering units to report to concentration points scattered all through Kiev. Chatter stopped as men listened for their own assignments. Eventually, Sack’s came: “Forty-First Panzergrenadiers to vehicle park seventeen, Forty-First Panzergrenadiers to vehicle park seventeen!”

  “Is that the one you were talking about?” the lance-corporal asked Lothar Zimmer. The little swarthy fellow nodded. He got to his feet and trudged off. Sack followed, glad to be with someone who knew where he was going.

  What he found when he got to the vehicle park dismayed him. Only a fraction of the division’s panzers, self-propelled guns, and mechanized infantry combat vehicles stood there. To eke them out and give the Forty-First Panzergrenadiers a fraction of the mobility they’d once enjoyed, a motley assortment of captured Red equipment and impressed civilian cars and trucks sprawled across the asphalt. Maintenance personnel were still slapping hasty tape crosses onto their doors and sides to identify them as German.

  “Look at all this soft-skinned junk,” Sack blurted. “The Reds won’t need missiles to take it out. They won’t even need machine guns. An officer’s pistol ought to do the job nicely.”

  “They’ll get some of us there, wherever ‘there’ is,” Zimmer said, shrugging. “Once that happens, we’re on our own, but that’s the way it always works.”

  To Sack’s relief, a lieutenant waved him into a mechanized infantry combat vehicle. He peered out through the Marder’s firing ports as it began to roll. At least he had a modicum of armor between himself and the unfriendly intentions of people in the wrong uniforms.

  Somebody inside the Marder came up with a name for where it was heading: Perayaslav, about eighty kilometers south and east along the Dnieper. An hour’s drive on the Autobahn, Sack thought. It took the rest of the day and all night. Not only did the alleged highway stop being paved not far out of Kiev—which slowed the impressed vehicles to a crawl—the enemy had it under heavy bombardment from artillery and rockets both.

  An antitank missile fired at extreme range from across the Dnieper took out the lead panzer and forced everyone else to detour around its blazing hulk. That made delays even worse. Jets blazoned with red stars arrogantly screamed past overhead. They raked the column with cannon fire and more missiles. The Luftwaffe was nowhere to be found. The Germans expended their whole stock of surface-to-air missiles before they got halfway to Perayaslav. As far as Sack could tell, they hit nothing.

  He must have dozed in spite of the racket and the rough ride, for he woke with a jerk when the Marder stopped. He had to piss so bad, it was a miracle he hadn’t wet himself while he slept. Artillery boomed ahead. He licked his lips. The firing sounded heavy. It was almost all incoming.

  Somebody banged on the combat vehicle’s entry doors with a rifle butt. Lothar Zimmer was sitting closest to them. When he opened the metal clamshell, whoever was outside handed him a bucket full of stew. He took it with a word of thanks and set it down between the two facing rows of seats. Everyone dug in with his own spoon. It was vile stuff, mostly potatoes and grease by the taste, but it filled the belly.

  Sack took advantage of the lull to leap out and empty his bladder. Another Marder had stopped in the mud a few meters away. One of its crewmen—likely the driver, judging by his fancy helmet packed full of electronics—stood by his machine doing exactly the same thing as Sack. The little the lance-corporal could see of his face looked gloomy. “We’re for it now,” the fellow said.

  “What do you know?” Sack asked eagerly. Nobody bothered telling infantrymen anything, but a driver couldn’t help but get the word over the radio net.

  The man answered, “The Reds are pushing hard. You can hear the guns, can’t you?” He didn’t give Sack a chance to answer. “Their field engineers have done something sneaky, too. They’ve built their pontoon bridges half a meter under the surface of the fucking Dnieper. Makes ’em harder to spot, a lot harder to knock out, but men and panzers just keep on coming across.”

  “Bad,” Sack said. The driver grudged him a nod, then climbed back into his fighting vehicle through the front hatch. He slammed the hatch down after him. The Marder’s diesel roared. Its tracks spat mud as it headed toward the fighting.

  When Sack returned to his own Marder, he passed on the news the driver had given him. His comrade’s faces said they were as delighted as he had been. The combat vehicle got moving again.

  A roar from the turret announced the launch of an antitank missile. Sack clutched his assault rifle and hoped it hit. If it didn’t, the Red panzer would return fire, and the Marder wasn’t armored against the big, fast, hard-hitting shells a 150-millimeter panzer cannon threw.

  The Marder didn’t blow up in the next few seconds, so the missile must have done its job. The combat vehicle stopped about a minute later. “This is where you get out, lads,” the driver announced over the intercom. “Good luck. Gott mit uns.”

  “Gott mit uns,” Sack echoed as he reluctantly left the relative safety of the Marder. He and his mates formed a skirmish line, each man six or eight meters from his comrades. The driver let them get a couple of hundred meters ahead, then followed, his cannon ready to deal with any threats their personal weapons could not handle.

  Glancing left and right, Sack saw more men heading up into the front lines with his squad, more combat vehicles moving with them to provide covering fire. He and his comrades were pushing through the battered German trench lines when the real Red artillery bombardment began. He leaped into a hole (he had endless variety from which to choose), held his helmet on his head with one hand, and waited for the nightmare to end.

  It lasted two solid hours that seemed two years long. The ground shook and jerked, as if in unending earthquake. The Reds
were giving it everything they had, rockets, shells, all different calibers, every weapon firing fast as it could. They wouldn’t have much ammunition left when the barrage was over, Sack thought dazedly somewhere in the middle of it, but that might not matter, either.

  The pounding let up at last. When Sack raised his head, he saw the German lines, already cratered, now resembled nothing so much as a freshly plowed field. Through the rain, through the mud, through the rubble, seemingly straight for him, came the Red ground attack.

  It was, in its way, a magnificent sight. The green-clad troops stormed forward almost shoulder to shoulder, assault rifles blazing, a wave of men to swamp the Germans who still survived. Panzers and armored fighting vehicles rumbled forward in their wake; jets and assault helicopters roared overhead with missiles and cannon to engage German armor.

  Sack wanted to empty his magazine into the onrushing horde. But if he and his comrades opened up too soon, the Asiatics would just dive for cover before enough of them could be slaughtered. “Fire discipline,” he said out loud, reminding himself.

  He and his comrades showed their training. Almost everyone started shooting at the same instant. The pieces of German artillery that hadn’t been knocked out added their voices to the fire fight. The infantry in green went down like wheat cut too soon. But as the first wave fell, another took its place.

  A brilliant white flash marked an enemy panzer brewing up; some infantryman’s wire-guided missile had struck home. But it was like fighting the hydra; for every head cut off, two more took its place. Sack scrambled backwards to keep from being outflanked and cut off.

  He looked back toward the Marder that had brought him into action. It was burning. How many divisions had the Reds managed to crowd into their fucking bridgehead, anyhow, and how much heavy equipment? Too many and too much was all he could think as he retreated past the combat vehicle’s corpse.

  Something moved behind the Marder. As if it had a life of its own, his assault rifle swung toward the motion. But before he squeezed off a burst, he saw it was Lothar Zimmer. He pointed the muzzle of his weapon at the ground. “You still alive, Zimmer?” he croaked.

  “I think so,” the other German said. He looked as battered, as overwhelmed, as Sack felt. Staring at the lance-corporal as if Sack had all the answers, he asked, “What do we do now?”

  “Try as best we can to get out, I guess,” Sack answered. It wasn’t going to be easy; firing came not only from in front of them and from both flanks, but from the rear as well. While their little piece of the battle hadn’t gone too badly, overall the Reds were forcing the breakthrough they’d sought.

  The two Germans started north, back toward Kiev. Sack hoped the enemy would take no special notice of them in the rain and the confusion. For a couple of kilometers, those hopes were realized. But just when he began to think he and Zimmer really might get away free, a burst of machine-gun fire sent them diving into a ditch.

  The fire let up for a moment. “Surrender or die!” a Red yelled in mangled German.

  “What do we do?” Zimmer hissed.

  “What can we do?” Sack said hopelessly. But if he stood up, even with his hands in the air, he was afraid the machine gunner would cut him in half. Then he remembered the propaganda leaflet he’d stuffed in his pocket, intending to use it for toilet paper. He dug it out, scanned it quickly. “Tow shong!” he shouted, as loud as he could. “Tow shong, tow shong!”

  “Tow shong?” The Red pronounced it differently; Sack hoped he’d been understood. Then the enemy switched to German: “Surrender?”

  “Ja, surrender. Tow shong!” Now Sack did stand. After a moment, Zimmer followed his lead. Their assault rifles lay in the mud at their feet, along with their dreams.

  Several green-clad soldiers ran up to them. Grins on their flat, high-cheekboned faces, their almond eyes glittering with excitement, they searched the Germans, stripped off their watches, their aid kits, and everything else small and movable they had on their persons.

  One of the Reds gestured with his weapon. Hands high, Sack and Zimmer stumbled toward captivity. A soldier of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army followed to make sure they did not try to escape.

  HOXBOMB

  We’ve built our technology on chemistry and physics. We’re just starting to get a handle on genetics and biochemistry. Most of the coming century’s big advances will probably be in those areas, and chances are people alive now would have no more idea what to make of what they’ll have in a hundred years than someone from 1850 swept forward a hundred years would know what to do with a television set … or an atomic bomb. And aliens who based their civilization on biotech would be just as wary of our mastery of the other stuff as we would by what they could do. This is a story of that kind of meeting.

  They met by twilight.

  The hours when day died and those when night passed away were the only ones humans and Snarre’t comfortably shared. Jack Cravath thought it was a minor miracle humans and Snarre’t shared anything on Lacanth C.

  You had to try to do business with them. Everybody said so. Everybody, in this case, was much too likely to be right. If the two races didn’t get along, they had plenty of firepower to devastate a pretty good stretch of this galactic arm. Black-hole generators, ecobombs, Planck disruptors, tailored metaviruses … The old saying was, they’d fight the war after this one with rocks. Not this time around—there’d be nobody left to do any fighting, and the rocks would be few and far between, too.

  By one of those coincidences that made you think Somebody had it in for both species, they’d found Lacanth C at the same time 150 years earlier. They’d both liked the world. What was not to like? It was a habitable planet, as yet unscrewed by intelligent life of its own. They both wanted it. They both needed it, too. In lieu of a coin flip, stone-paper-scissor, or that spiral-arm-wrecking war, they decided to settle it jointly.

  Codominium, they called it. On Earth, such arrangements went back to the seventh century CE—ancient days indeed—when the Byzantines and Arabs shared Cyprus for a while. The Snarre’t had precedents of their own. Jack Cravath didn’t know the details about those; he just knew there were some.

  And he knew codominium worked—as well as it worked, which often wasn’t very—only because all the alternatives that anybody could see were worse. His own alternatives were none too good right this minute, either. By choice, he would have closed his scooter dealership when the sun set and gone home to dinner with his newly pregnant wife. But that would have shown interspecies insensitivity. You didn’t do such things on Lacanth C, not if you had anywhere close to your proper complement of marbles you didn’t.

  He sat in his office instead, while darkness deepened around him. The ceiling lights began to glow a dull, dim orange. As far as anybody could tell, that amount and shade of illumination annoyed both races equally.

  In a little more than an hour, when it was full dark outside, he could legitimately close. Then he could use his IR goggles to get out of the interspecies business district in Latimer and back to the human residential zone, where such perverse curiosities as street lights were allowed. His stomach growled. Beverly’s good chicken stew tonight. He was hungry, dammit.

  He could watch the street from his dealership. Humans went by on scooters or, occasionally, on Snarre’i drofs or caitnops. Far more Snarre’t rode their beasts, but some of them sat on scooters. That was why—aside from law and custom—he kept the dealership open into their hours. Every so often, he did business with them. He wasn’t allergic­ to fattening up his credit balance, not even a little bit.

  That wasn’t the only reason he was always happy when he unloaded a scooter on a Snarre’. Drofs and caitnops creeped him out. They looked like nothing so much as Baba Yaga’s house, only with most of the house part gone: oversized yellow scaly legs with a platform for the rider and handholds through which he controlled his drof. Press here, and it went forward
. Press here, and it stopped. Press here, and it turned right. Press here—left. Press here and here, and it opened its mouth so you could give it some yummy drof treats.

  He shivered. The Snarre’t had a technology that mostly matched and sometimes outdid humanity’s. But theirs was biotech from the ground up, with mechanical gadgets as relatively recent high-tech innovations. It wasn’t the way humanity had done things, but it worked.

  Caitnops and drofs did what they did about as reliably as scooters did the same thing. Human programmers and engineers had loudly insisted biocomputers could never come close to electronic gadgets … till the Snarre’t showed they were talking through their hats.

  For their part, the Snarre’t thought the idea of the Turing test was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. Of course computers were intelligent, as far as they were concerned. How not, when they were built from neurons? And the Snarre’t had left in the pain response, even amplified it, to make sure their servants didn’t turn into masters. Jack shivered again.

  He looked at his watch. Half an hour till he could bail out. He thought about chicken stew, and about Bev, and about the baby due in 270 days or so (talking about months was pretty silly on a world without a moon—Lacanth C’s year was divided into neat, tidy tenths). Beverly’d found out within hours that she’d caught. That was a Snarre’i-derived test; humanity’s reagents weren’t nearly so sensitive. He smiled. The baby would be their first.

  The door opened. Two Snarre’t walked in. Jack muttered under his breath. Bev wouldn’t be happy if he came home late. But she would if he made a sale. “I greet you,” he called to them in Snarre’l.

  “Hello,” they chorused in English. Using the other race’s language first showed you had manners.

  Returning to English himself, Jack asked, “What can I do for you today?”