Worldwar: Upsetting the Balance Read online

  With that kind of fire raking the trees and bushes, there was only one thing to do. “Let’s get out of here,” Mordechai yelled, and he rolled away from the road. The Lizards weren’t the only ones screeching now; screams from the darkness and Polish cries for the Virgin said some of those sprayed bullets and shells had found targets.

  The advantage of opening fire from close to the highway was that you were right on top of the enemy. The disadvantage was that you took a long time to get away from his guns. Not until Anielewicz scrambled behind an oak tree whose trunk was thicker than his own did he begin to feel safe.

  Firing from the road died away. Anielewicz didn’t think the partisans had hurt the Lizards so badly they’d call in air strikes. This sort of warfare walked a fine line, if you did too little, you didn’t harm the enemy. If you did too much, you were liable to provoke him into squashing you like a bug. The Lizards could do that almost anywhere in the world, if they wanted to badly enough. Keeping them too busy in a lot of places to concentrate on any one worked fairly well.

  Mordechai was walking a line himself, but not a fine one. It involved fetching up against a tree with his nose, stepping into a hole and twisting his ankle (by luck alone, not too badly), and splashing through a tiny rill he discovered by the simple expedient of getting his feet wet. Some people moved through the woods at night silent as a lynx. He sounded more like a drunken wisent. He thanked God the Lizards were even less woodswise.

  “That you, Shmuel?” somebody hissed—Jerzy.

  “Yes, it’s me,” Anielewicz answered in Polish. He had no idea the other partisan was within a kilometer till he spoke. Well, that was why Jerzy walked point while he shlepped along well back in the line.

  But the Pole didn’t sound angry at him. “That was a good scheme you had there. The Lizards really like sticking their snouts into that stuff, don’t they?”

  “That they do,” Mordechai said. “The ones who get hooked good, they’ll do just about anything for a taste of ginger, and a lot of them are hooked—quite a lot of them, if what happened back there is any clue.”

  “Might as well be pussy, eh?” Friedrich stepped out from behind a tree. He was twice Jerzy’s size, but just about as light on his feet—and it didn’t do to think him stupid, either. He’d understood Polish and answered in the same language.

  None of which made Mordechai feel easy around him. “I don’t think they keep their brains in their pricks, unlike some people I could name,” he said. He tried to keep his tone light, but wasn’t sure how well he succeeded; having to deal with Wehrmacht men made his hackles rise.

  “If men keep brains in their pricks, why do you Jews make yourselves stupider by cutting some off?” Friedrich retorted. Was that just raillery, or did the German mean something more by it? Who could tell what a German had been up to in Poland before the Lizards came? Anielewicz gave it up. They were—supposed to be—on the same side now.

  Jerzy said, “Come on—we go this way now.” Mordechai was damned if he knew how Jerzy could tell which way to go, or, for that matter, which way this way was. But the Pole was rarely wrong—and Mordechai had no idea which way he was supposed to be going. He followed. So did Friedrich.

  The point man’s skill or instinct or whatever it was led them back to the partisans’ camp deep in the forest. No one risked a fire even with thick tree cover overhead; the Lizards had too many eyes in the air. They just found blankets, rolled themselves in them, and tried to go to sleep.

  For Anielewicz, that proved impossible. For one thing, adrenaline still sang through him from the fight. For another, he wasn’t used to sleeping in a blanket on the hard ground. And for a third, men—and a few women—not lucky enough to have been guided by Jerzy kept stumbling into camp all night long. Some of them moaned with wounds.

  Some of them couldn’t sleep, either. He joined one of the little knots of fighters sitting in the darkness and trying to figure out how well they’d done. One fellow claimed four Lizards downed, another twice that many. It was hard to figure out the partisans’ losses, but at least two men were known dead, and four or five wounded. What morning would prove remained to be seen.

  Mordechai said, “If we hit them this hard every time, we’ll make them know we’re there. We can afford to trade one for one longer than they can.” That produced thoughtful silence, then grunts he took as agreement.

  Sirens screaming, airplanes roaring overhead, bombs crashing down, antiaircraft guns pounding maniacally—Moishe Russie had been through that in Warsaw in 1939, when the Luftwaffe methodically pounded the Polish capital to pieces. But this was London almost four years later, with the Lizards trying to finish the job the Germans had started here, too.

  “Make it stop!” his son Reuven cried, one more wail lost in the many that filled the Soho shelter.

  “We can’t make it stop, darling,” Rivka Russie answered. “It will be all right.” She turned to Moishe. She didn’t speak again, but her face held two words: I hope.

  He nodded back, sure he bore an identical expression. Having to admit your powerlessness to your child was awful, and being afraid you were lying when you reassured him even worse. But what else could you do when you had no power and were dreadfully afraid things wouldn’t be all right?

  More bombs hit, somewhere close by. The mattresses strewn across the floor of the shelter jumped with the impact. The outcry inside the shelter rose to a new pitch of polylingual panic. Along with English and the Russies’ Yiddish, Moishe heard Catalan, Hindustani, Greek, and several languages he couldn’t identify. Soho held immigrants and refugees from all over the world.

  Reuven squealed. At first, Moishe was afraid he’d hurt himself. Then he realized the flickering candlelight had been enough to let his son spot the Stephanopoulos twins, who lived in the flat across the hall from his own. Reuven had no more than a handful of words in common with Demetrios and Constantine, but that didn’t keep them from being friends. They started wrestling with one another. When the next flight of Lizard planes dropped another load of death, they paid hardly any attention.

  Moishe glanced over at Rivka. “I wish I could be so easily distracted.”

  “So do I,” she said wearily. “You at least don’t look like you’re worried.”

  “No?” he said, surprised. “The beard must hide it, because I am.” His hand went to his whiskery chin. A lot of men were sporting whiskers in London these days, what with shaving soap, razor blades, and hot water all in short supply. He’d worn a beard in Warsaw, though, and felt naked when he shaved it off to escape to Lodz one step ahead of the Lizards after he refused to be their radio mouthpiece any more.

  They’d captured him anyhow, a few months later. Growing the beard again had been the one good thing about the prison into which they’d clapped him. He shook his head. No, there had been one other good thing about that prison—the commando raid that got him out of it. The trip to England by submarine had followed immediately.

  He peered around the shelter. Amazingly, some people managed to sleep despite the chaos. The stink of fear and stale piss was the same as he’d known back in Warsaw.

  Rivka said, “Maybe that was the last wave of them.”

  “Alevai omayn,” Moishe answered fervently: “May it be so—amen!” The vigor of his reply made Rivka smile. Wishing didn’t make things so, worse luck, but he didn’t hear any more explosions, either nearby or off in the distance. Maybe Rivka was right.

  The all-clear sounded half an hour later. Friends and neighbors woke the men and women who’d slept in spite of everything. People slowly went back above ground to head back to their homes—and to discover whether they had homes to head back to. It was about as dark on the street as it had been inside the shelter. The sky was overcast; the only light came from fires flickering here and there. Moishe had seen that in Warsaw, too.

  Fire engines screamed through the streets toward the worst of the blazes. “I hope the Lizards didn’t wreck too many mains,” Moishe said. “They’ll need
all the water pressure they can get.”

  “I just hope our block of flats is still standing,” Rivka said. They turned the corner. “Oh, thank God, it is.” Her voice changed timbre: “Get away from there, Reuven! That’s broken glass—you could cut yourself.”

  A woman lay groaning in front of the apartment building. Moishe hurried over to her. He’d been a medical student when the war started, and used what he’d learned in the Warsaw ghetto—not that all the medical training in the world did any good when people were starving to death.

  “My leg, my leg,” the woman moaned. Russie was just starting to learn English, so that didn’t mean much to him. But the way she clutched at the injured part, and the way the shin bent where it had no business bending, told him everything he needed to know.

  “Doctor,” he said; he’d made sure he learned that word. He pointed to himself. It wasn’t quite true, but he was the closest thing to a doctor the poor woman would see for a while, and thinking he was the genuine article might give her more confidence in him. He wanted that; he knew how to set a broken leg, but he also knew how much the process hurt.

  The woman sighed, he hoped with relief. A small crowd had gathered around her and Moishe. He looked up to the people and said, “Fetch me a couple of flat boards and some rags to tie them to her leg.”

  Nobody moved. Russie wondered what was wrong until Rivka said gently, “Dear, they don’t understand Yiddish.”

  He thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand, feeling seventeen different kinds of idiot. He tried again, this time in the clear German he’d learned in school. Every time he had to use it, irony rose up to choke him. Here, in the heart of Germany’s most important enemy, the irony was doubled.

  But no one in the crowd followed German any better than Yiddish. In desperation, Moishe tried Polish. “Here, I’ll get what you need,” somebody said in the same language. Better yet, he translated Russie’s request into English. Several people hurried away. In the rubble from years of bombings, boards and rags were easy to come by.

  Moishe said to the fellow who spoke Polish, “Tell her I’m going to set her leg and splint it. Tell her it will hurt.” The man spoke in English. The injured woman nodded. “Maybe you and a couple of other men should hold her while I work,” Moishe went on. “If she thrashes around, she’s liable to make things worse.”

  The woman tried to thrash. Moishe didn’t blame her; he admired the way she did her best to keep gasps from turning into shrieks. He got the broken bones aligned and tied the splint tight to keep them from shifting again. When he was through, the woman whispered, “Thank you, Doctor.”

  He understood that. It warmed him. When he stood up, his own knees clicked. The sky was growing light. He sighed. No point in going to bed. He had an early broadcast scheduled at the BBC Overseas Services. Yawning, he said to Rivka, “I may as well just get my script and go on in.”

  “Oh, dear,” she said sympathetically, but nodded. He and his family went upstairs together. He found the manila folder with the papers inside, then realized he was wearing only a greatcoat over pyjamas. He threw on a white shirt and a pair of trousers and headed out to face the world. A stretcher party had taken away the woman with the broken leg. Moishe hoped she’d do well. He wouldn’t sleep, but he thought his wife and son might.

  The building that housed the BBC Overseas Services was at 200 Oxford Street, not far west of his Soho flat and a few blocks east of Hyde Park. As he walked to work, London came to life around him. Pigeons cooed and sparrows chirped—lucky creatures, they knew nothing of war, save that it made the air sharp with smoke. Bicycles, men and women afoot, and horse-drawn wagons and even buggies taken out of sheds where they’d moldered for a generation clogged the streets. Petrol was in as desperately short supply here as in Warsaw or Lodz; only fire engines had all they needed.

  Nathan Jacobi approached the building that housed the studios from the other direction at the same time as Moishe reached it. The two men waved to each other. Moishe broadcast in Yiddish and German; Jacobi translated his words into English. His Yiddish was polished and elegant. If his English came close to it—Russie wasn’t qualified to judge, but doubted the BBC would have hired him if it didn’t—he made a very effective newsreader indeed.

  Now he surveyed Moishe with a sympathetic eye. “Bad for you last night? You look done in.”

  “I am done in,” Russie said. “I hope the tea in there has a jolt to it this morning. If it doesn’t, I’m apt to fall asleep in front of the microphone.”

  “It’ll be hot, anyhow,” Jacobi said, which was true. “As for the jolt, you never can tell from day to day, not with these messes of leaves and roots and rose hips we get instead of the proper stuff.” He sighed. “What I wouldn’t give for a cup of vintage Darjeeling—Bloody war.”

  The last two words were in English. Moishe knew what they meant, but took the adjective literally. “Bloody war is right. And the worst of it is, we can’t make the Lizards out to be as black as we would otherwise, because they haven’t done much worse to us than we were already doing to ourselves.”

  “You would know best about that. Anyone who was in Poland—” Jacobi shook his head. “But still, if we hadn’t been geared up to a fever pitch to fight each other, could we have put up such a battle against the Lizards?”

  “I suppose not, but it’s no credit to us that we were,” Russie answered. “It’s not as if we knew they were coming. We’d have gone right on slaughtering ourselves if they hadn’t come, too. Still, I admit that’s neither here nor there at the moment. They are here, and we have to make life miserable for them.” He waved the pages of his script, then fished out his pass and showed it to the guard at the door. The guard nodded. Russie and Jacobi went in to get ready to broadcast.

  3

  “Forgive me, Exalted Fleetlord, but I have an emergency call for you from the 206th Emperor Yower,” Atvar’s adjutant said. In the vision screen, the younger male looked as worried as he sounded.

  “Very well, Pshing, patch it through,” Atvar said, setting aside for a moment the war against the Big Uglies for his private conflict with the shiplord Straha. After Straha failed to topple him from command of the conquest fleet, the shiplord should have known revenge was on its way. Atvar wondered what sort of lying nonsense Straha would come up with to justify himself.

  Pshing’s face disappeared from the vision screen. It was not, however, replaced by that of Straha. Instead, Atvar’s chief security officer, a male named Diffal, turned his eye turrets toward the fleetlord. Diffal was earnest and capable. All the same, Atvar yearned for the cunning deviousness Drefsab had brought to the job. Even as a ginger taster, he’d been the best in the fleet. But now he was dead, and Atvar had to make do. “Do you have the shiplord Straha in your custody?” he demanded.

  “Exalted Fleetlord, I do not.” Diffal also sounded worried. “I am informed that, shortly before the arrival of my team aboard the 206th Emperor Yower, the shiplord Straha left this vessel and traveled down from orbit to confer with Horrep, shiplord of the 29th Emperor Jevon, whose ship has landed in the central region of the northern portion of the lesser continental mass, near the city called St. Louis.”

  Atvar hissed. Horrep was a member of Straha’s faction. Pshing, who must have been monitoring the conversation from his outer office, came onto the screen for a moment. “Exalted Fleetlord, the 206th Emperor Yower did not report this departure to us.”

  Diffal said, “I have been in communication with the 29th Emperor Jevon. Straha is not aboard that ship, nor has his shuttlecraft landed nearby. I examined the radar records of the trajectory of the shuttlecraft. Computer analysis of the course they indicate gives a landing point relatively close to the 29th Emperor Jevon, but not so close as would be expected if Straha truly intended to confer with Horrep. The shiplord Horrep, I should inform you, vehemently denies that Straha sent messages announcing a visit, as custom and courtesy would have required.”

  “Ever since we came to Tosev 3,
custom and courtesy have been corroding,” Atvar said. Diffal stared back at him, not replying. One couldn’t expect a male in security to be concerned with philosophy as well. Atvar dragged himself back to the matter at hand: “Well, where is the shiplord Straha, then?”

  “Exalted Fleetlord,” Diffal said, “I don’t know.”

  Jens Larssen was sick and tired of bicycles. He was sick and tired of pedaling all over creation on missions he shouldn’t have had to take on and knew he wouldn’t get thanked for, and, of all the things he never would have expected before he set out from Denver, he was sick to death of pine trees.

  “First the Arapaho goddamn National Forest, now the Payette goddamn National Forest—or is it the Nez Perce goddamn National Forest yet?” he asked as he worked his way up US 95 toward Lewiston, Idaho. He was used to talking to himself on the road; days often went by when he didn’t talk to anybody else. The longer he spent on his bike, the better he liked being alone.

  He wiped sweat off his forehead with a sleeve. The day was hot, but he wore long sleeves and a long-brimmed cap anyway—he was so fair that he worried more about burning in the sun than baking in his clothes. His ears, which the cap didn’t protect, were a permanently raw red peeling mess.

  “Not that anybody gives a damn what I look like these days,” he said. Self-pity notwithstanding, he wasn’t a bad-looking fellow: a skinny blond Viking, just past thirty, with bright blue eyes. A sour twist to his mouth marred his features, but since he couldn’t see it, he didn’t know it was there.

  A Lizard jet screamed by, high overhead, flying west. The Lizards held the Snake River valley from Idaho Falls to Twin Falls, and used it as an air base against the Pacific Northwest. Outside of their airfields, though, they didn’t seem to give a damn about the area—a sentiment with which Jens heartily concurred. He’d gone through several towns—even what passed for cities hereabouts—without seeing a one of the little scaly bastards.