Tilting the Balance

XX

“Assembled shiplords, I am pleased to report to you that progress in the conquest of Tosev 3, while slower than we hoped when we reached this planet, is nonetheless accelerating,” Atvar told the throng of high-ranking males aboard the 127th Emperor Hetto. After some time down on Tosev 3, being back on his bannership felt good.

“Some details would be appreciated,” Shiplord Straha called out.

“I have assembled the shiplords here this day to give those details,” Atvar said. He did not show Straha the dislike he felt. Straha was waiting for him to get into trouble, for the campaign to fail. If enough went wrong, the shiplords might turn Atvar out of power and set someone in his place. Straha wanted to be that someone.

Kirel had had such ambitions, too, but Kirel was a good male-he put the cause of the Race ahead of personal ambition. All Straha cared about was himself and the moment. For all the forethought and restraint he showed, he might as well we been a Big Ugly.

To Kirel, Atvar murmured, “The first situation map, please.”

“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel replied. He touched a button on the podium. A large hologram sprang into being behind the two males.

“This is the big northern land area of the main continental mass,” Atvar said by way of explanation. “As you will see, we have smashed through the line of defense centered on the town of Kaluga which the SSSR threw, up in a last desperate attempt to hold our forces away from their capital, Moskva.”

“The fall of this capital will give me, particular satisfaction, and not just from the military and strategic perspective,” Kirel said. ‘The regime currently ruling the SSSR came to power, assembled shiplords, as many of you know, after murdering their emperor.”

Although most of the males in the hall did know that, a murmur of horror ran through it just the same. Impericide was not a crime the Race had imagined until the Big Uglies brought it to their notice.

“The military and strategic considerations are not to be taken lightly, either,” Atvar said. “Moskva being not only an administrative but also a communications hub, its capture will go a long way toward taking the SSSR out of the war. That accomplished, we shall be able to devote more of our resources to the defeat of Deutschland, and shall be able to attack the Deutsche from improved positions.”

He enjoyed the buzz of approval that rose from the shiplords; he had not heard that sound often enough while discussing Tosevite affairs. At his hand signal, Kirel pressed the button again and brought up another map.

Atvar said, “This is the island of Britain, which lies off the northwestern coast of Tosev 3’s main continental mass. The British have also made themselves into unmitigated nuisances to us. Because the island was so small, we did not reckon it of major significance in our opening attacks. We made the same error with the island empire of Nippon, on the eastern edge of this same land mass. Air strikes have harmed both empires, but not enough. The males and materiel freed up after the defeat of the SSSR will allow us to mount full-scale invasions of all these pestilential islands.”

“Permission to speak, Exalted Fleetlord?” Straha called.

“Speak,” Atvar said. Straha hadn’t asked for permission the last time. The list of successes and anticipated successes must have served notice to him that he wasn’t likely to be fleetlord any time soon.

Straha said, “With the Deutsche still holding northern-‘France’ is the proper geographic designation, is it not? — can we invade this Britain with reasonable hope of success, even assuming the SSSR drops out of the fight against us?”

“Computer models show our probability of success as being higher than seventy percent under the circumstances you describe,” Atvar answered. “With the SSSR still in. the war and forcing us to continue to expend resources to suppress it, chances for a successful invasion of Britain drop to slightly below fifty percent. Shall I send you a printout of the analysis, Shiplord?”

“If you please, Exalted Fleetlord.”

That was the most politeness Atvar had heard from Straha in a long time. The fleetlord signaled Kirel for the next map. When it appeared, Atvar said, “This, as you see, illustrates our position in the northern part of the lesser continental mass, particularly in our fight against the empire, or rather not-empire, known as the United States. The major urban center called Chicago, which eluded us in our previous attack, has now been reached by our armies; its reduction is only a matter of time.”

Kirel said, “With other major moves planned, Exalted Fleetlord, can we afford the drain on our resources a hard-fought city campaign would entail?”

“My judgment is that we can,” Atvar answered. Kirel might be a good and loyal male, but he was also too cautious and conservative to suit the fleetlord. Straha, on the other hand, fairly bounced in his seat, so eager was he to mix it up with the Big Uglies. Yes, he might have been a Tosevite himself. “If the fleetlord decrees it shall be done, then of course it shall be done,” Kirel declared Atvar knew he would have to back into cold sleep if he wanted to live long enough to hear Straha make the same pledge.

The fleetlord signaled to Kirel once more, and a new map replaced the one of the northern portion of the lesser continenal mass. This one was far more detailed: it showed the street plan of a seacoast town and enough of the hinterland to depict tumbledown ruin on a hilltop not far away.

“I admit, assembled shiplords, that the situation portrayed here lacks the large-scale strategic importance of those I have previously outlined,” Atvar said. “Nonetheless, I shall set it forth for you because it also illustrates, in a different way, the progress we are making against the Tosevites. Have security briefings brought the Big Ugly named Skorzeny to the attention of everyone gathered here at this time?”

“The Tosevite terrorist? Yes, Exalted Fleetlord,” one of the males said. Atvar was comfortably certain some of them had paid no attention to their security briefings. Some of them never did. Well, no matter, not today. As far as Skorzeny was concerned, it would soon be no matter ever again.

Atvar resumed: “One of our operatives has set up an elaborate scheme in this town-it is known as Split-to lure the vassal state known as Croatia out of the empire of Deutschland and toward acceptance of the dominion of the Race. If this succeeds, well and good. But the effort has deliberately been kept to a small scale, to let the Deutsche get the notion they can check it by similarly modest means. We have now confirmed that Skorzeny is operating in the area. All that remains is for our skilled operative to close the trap on him. I expect that to be completed within days. Without this Skorzeny, the Big Uglies will not be able to cause us nearly so much trouble.”

The assembled shiplords didn’t quite burst into cheers, but they came close. Atvar basked in the warm glow of their approval as if he were lying on a sandbank under summer sunshine back on Home.

Heinrich Jager mooched through the streets of Split. In old Yugoslav Army boots, baggy civilian pants, and faded gray Italian Army tunic, he fit in perfectly. Half the men in town wore a mixture of military and civilian garb. Even his craggy features belonged here; he could have been a Croat or a Serb as easily as a German He ambled right past a couple of Lizard patrols. They didn’t turn so much as an eye turret his way.

The tavern across the street from the south wall of Diocletian’s palace had seen better days. It had once had a window in front, but the square of plywood nailed where the window had been was weathered almost gray; it had been up there a long time.

Jager opened the door, slid inside, shut it behind him in a hurry. The fellow behind the bar was about fifty, going gray, with bushy eyebrows that grew together above his bony beak of a nose. Jager hadn’t learned much in the way of Serbo-Croatian, but he had a little Italian. In that language, he said, “Are you Barisha? I hear you’ve got some special brandy in stock.”

The bartender looked him over. “We keep the special stuff in the back room,” he said at last. “You want to come with me?”

“Si grazie,” Jager said. A couple of old men sat at a table in the corner, drinking beer. They didn’t look up when Jager accompanied Barisha into that back room.

The back room was considerably bigger than the one in front; it took up not only the rear of Barisha’s tavern but also the shuttered shops to either side. It needed to be large, for it was packed with poorly shaven men in a motley mixture of clothes. One of the tallest of them grinned at him, his teeth shining in the candlelight. “Thought you’d never get here,” the fellow said in German.

“I’m here, Skorzeny,” Jager answered. “You can take that makeup off your cheek now, if you care to.”

“I was just getting used to going without the scar, too,” the man said. “Come here-I’ve saved one of the Fallschirmjagerwehrs for you.” He held the weapon up over his head.

Jager pushed his way through the crowd. Some of the men carried infantry rifles, others submachine guns. A few, like Skorzeny himself, had paratroop rifles-automatic weapons that fired a full-sized cartridge from a twenty-round box magazine. Jager eagerly took the FG-42 and several full magazines on Skorzeny. “This is as good as anything the Lizards carry,” he said.

“Better than what the Lizards carry,” Skorzeny said. “More powerful cartridge.”

Not inclined to argue the point, Jager said, “When are we going to go down the hole?” He pointed to a black pit that, from the look of it, might have led straight down to hell. It didn’t; it led to the underground galleries inside the wall to Diocletian’s palace.

“Five minutes by my watch after Captain Petrovic and his merry boys start their attack on the palace,” Skorzeny answered. “Five minutes,” he repeated in Italian and Serbo-Croatian. Everybody nodded.

A couple of men came in after Jager. Skorzeny passed them submachine guns. Sneaking the weapons into Split had been harder than getting the men in, but Skorzeny and his local contacts, whoever they were, had managed the job.

A thuttering roar filled the back room, followed by another and another. In Italian, somebody yelled, “Start watching the time,” to Skorzeny.

He shook his big head. “That’s not fighting. That’s just some of the Lizards heading off in helicopters.” He grinned again. “So much the better. That leaves fewer of them for us deal with.”

Even up front with the pilot and weapons officer, the helicopter was noisy. Drefsab didn’t care to think about what it was like for the eight males back in the troop compartment. He waited until all three of his assault aircraft had taken off before he turned to the pilot and said, “On to the ruined castle at Klis. The Deutsche and the Croats there have been plotting against us long enough. This time we bag Skorzeny and all his henchmales.”

“To the castle at Klis,” the pilot repeated, as if he were hearing the order for the first time rather than something like the hundred and first. “It shall be done, superior sir.”

The town of Split shrank as the helicopter gained height. Drefsab found it remarkably ugly: bricks and stucco and red tile roofs were nothing like the concrete and glass and stone of Home. The ruined castle, already growing larger in the distance as the pilot shoved the collective forward, struck him as even uglier.

“Why are you so hot to be rid of this particular Big Ugly, superior sir?” the pilot asked.

“Because he is the biggest nuisance on this entire nuisance of a planet,” Drefsab answered. “He is responsible for more grief to the Race than any other three Big Ugly males I can think of.” He didn’t go into detail; the pilot had no need to know. But his sincerity was so obvious that the pilot turned one eye turret to look at him for a moment before returning full attention to the flight.

The ruined gray stone pile of Klis drew swiftly nearer. Drefsab waited for the Tosevites hiding within to open up with small-arms fire. Satellite and aerial reconnaissance both claimed they had no antiaircraft artillery in there. He hoped the males in recon knew whereof they spoke.

He wished he’d tasted ginger before he got into the helicopter. His body craved it. But he’d restrained himself. Ginger would take away his doubts, and against a foe as wily as Skorzeny he wanted them all in place.

“Shouldn’t they be shooting at us by now?” the weapons officer asked. The castle of Klis seemed very quiet and peaceful, as if no raiders had lived in it for thousands of years. Drefsab hissed softly. Thousands of years ago, the castle probably hadn’t even been built. Tosev 3 was a new world.

He answered the male’s question: “You never can tell with Big Uglies. They may be lying low, hoping to make us think they aren’t really there. Or they may have some sort of ambush set.”

“I’d like to see them try, superior sir,” the weapons officer said. “It’d be a sorry-looking ambush after it bit down on us.”

Drefsab liked his confidence. “Let’s give the place a sandstorm of fire, to make sure we don’t have any trouble getting our males on the ground.”

“It shall be done.” The weapons officer and the pilot spoke together. The pilot called on the radio to his opposite numbers in the other two helicopters. One of them dropped to the ground to unload its soldiers. The other, along with the helicopter in which Drefsab flew, popped up into the air and started pasting the castle of Klis with rockets and machine-gun bullets. No return fire came. As soon as the eight males had scuttled out of the landed helicopter, it rose into the air to join the barrage, while the second one descended to disgorge its soldiers.

Drefsab took a firm grip on his personal weapon. He intended to go down there with the fighting males, and to be certain Skorzeny was dead. There were whole little Tosevite empires that had caused the Race less trouble than that one Deutsch male. Stolen nuclear materials, Mussolini kidnapped to spew propaganda against the Race, a landcruiser lifted out from under everyone’s snout at Besancon, and who could guess how many other crimes lay at his feet.

Males scrambled away from the second helicopter, opening up with their personal weapons to add to the fire that made whatever defenders huddled in Klis keep their heads down. The pilot started to lower Drefsab’s helicopter to let off the males it carried, but before he could grab the collective, the radio speaker taped to his hearing diaphragm began to chatter.

“You’d better hear this, superior sir,” he said, and touched the control that fed the incoming signal to the main speaker in the flight cabin.

Through engine noise and ordnance, a male’s voice squawked, “Superior sir, the outwalls of our base are under attack by a motley crew of Big Uglies with rifles and other small arms. Their forcing a breach seems unlikely, but our defending males have taken some casualties.” Some of the noise of firing, Drefsab realized, was coming out of the speaker.

“If the situation is not urgent, I shall continue neutralizing this target before I return,” he answered. His mouth fell open in a laugh of amusement and relief. So Skorzeny had chosen this moment to attack, had he? Well, he would pay for it. The fighting males he’d left here would be destroyed. The Race would keep a garrison in Klis from now on. Control in this area would expand at the expense of the Deutsche, and one Drefsab, ginger-tasting addict though he was, would rise in prestige and importance to the leaders of the Race’s forces on Tosev 3.

“Shall I proceed as planned, superior sir?” the pilot asked. “Yes,” Drefsab said, and the helicopter lost altitude. Drefsab ran a battery check on the radio gear implanted in his helmet. If the main base needed to get in touch with him, he wanted to ensure that he wasn’t cut off. That was the only special precaution he took against Skorzeny’s attack.

Ever so gently, the helicopter’s wheels touched ground. Drefsab clapped the helmet onto his head and hurried back into the fighting compartment to exit with the rest of the males.

When Jager fought, he was usually closed up inside the thick steel shell of a panzer, which muffled the racket all around him. The tavern’s wall didn’t do nearly so good a job as that; the rifle and machine-gun fire from and at the wall of Diocletian’s palace all sounded as if it were aimed right at him. The other soldiers and guerrillas in the back room of Barisha’s tavern took no special notice, so he assumed they were used to this kind of din.

Through it, Skorzeny said, “Two minutes!” in German, Italian, and Serbo-Croatian. In German alone, he went on, “Do we have all the men with the automatic weapons closest to the hole?”

The question was rhetorical; he’d bullied people into place before the shooting outside started. With his FG-42, Jager was one of the lucky few who would lead the way through the tunnel. Around the troops with automatic rifles clustered those who carried submachine guns; the men who bore ordinary bolt-action rifles would bring up the rear.

“One minute!” Skorzeny said, and then, what seemed to Jager a year or two later, “Now!” He was the first one to plunge into the tunnel.

Jager went in either fourth or fifth; in all the jostling, he wasn’t sure which. The dim light behind him vanished, leaving him surrounded by absolute black. The toe of his boot caught the heel of the man in front of him. He stumbled and almost fell. When he straightened up, his head bumped the low ceiling. Dirt showered down; some got inside his collar and slid down his back. He wished he had a helmet-for more reasons than keeping the dirt off. He also wondered how Skorzeny was faring in the tunnel-the SS man, who lacked only eight or ten centimeters of two meters, probably had to bend himself double to move at all.

Though the tunnel couldn’t have been more than fifteen meters long, it seemed to go on forever. It was narrow as well as low-ceilinged; whenever his elbow bumped a wall, Jager felt s if it were closing in on him. He was afraid someone would start screaming in the confining dark. Some people couldn’t even stand being shut up in a panzer with the hatches dogged. The tunnel was a hundred times worse.

He realized he could see the silhouette of the soldier in front of him. A couple of paces later, he emerged in a dusty storeroom illuminated only by lights from other rooms, none of them especially close. All the same, after the tunnel it seemed almost noonday bright.

“Spread out, spread out,” Skorzeny urged in a hissing whisper. “Give the men behind you room to get out.” When the whole force had emerged, Skorzeny thumped Jager on the back. “The colonel here, being an expert in archaeology, knows where the stairs are.”

By now, the SS man-and several others among the raiders-had studied the underground maze enough to know it as well as Jager, if not better. He appreciated the nod even so: reminded the men that his word counted next after Skorzeny’s. He said, “I just don’t want to find a lot of Lizards down here. If we have to fight underground, we won’t get up the surface and sweep them off the walls.”

“That’s what Petrovic’s diversion is for,” Skorzeny said: “to flush all of them up to the top so they won’t notice us till too late-for them.”

Jager knew that was what the diversion was for. He also knew diversions weren’t always diverting enough to do what they were supposed to do. He kept quiet. They’d find out soon enough how well this one had worked.

Skorzeny turned his attention to the group as a whole. “My advice is simple: shoot first.” He repeated the phrase in Italian and Serbo-Croatian. The men he led just grinned-they’d figured that one out for themselves. Skorzeny grinned, too. “Come on, you lugs.” As he’d been first into the tunnel, he was first out of the storeroom.

Jager had never seen the underground maze of hallways and chambers in Diocletian’s palace, not till now. But he moved through it confidently, counting off turns under his breath as he trotted along. A blast of heat came from one big room he passed: the Lizard barracks. If ever the raiders would be discovered down here, this was the place.

No shouts, no hisses, no gunfire. There ahead were the stone stairs. Skorzeny bounded up them three at a time. The rest of the men, Jager still near the front of the pack, ran at his heels. The panzer colonel’s stomach knotted. An eye turret turned at the wrong moment and the assault could still turn into a slaughter.

Trying to match the Lizards’ swiveling eyes, his head twisted every which way as he reached the top of the stairs. The aliens were still banging away from the wall, but the bulk of the baptistry hid them from him-and him from them.

Skorzeny used hand signals to divide the raiders into two groups and to show no one had better argue against Jager’s leading one of them. He pointed right and then forward to show Jager’s group was to go around the baptistry, then led his own group to the left.

“Come on,” Jager hissed to his men. He trotted at their fore: if you wanted to impress anybody who’d already seen Skorzeny in action, you’d better lead from the front. Otherwise, your men wouldn’t follow you for long.

He waved the group to a halt as they came to the corner of the baptistry. FG-42 at the ready, he stepped out into the narrow street that led north to the wall. As he did so, he heard Skorzeny’s group start firing.

A Lizard a couple of hundred meters ahead whirled at that unexpected sound. It caught sight of Jager. Before it could bring up its rifle, he cut it down. “Forward!” he shouted, and ran up the street. The pound of boots on cobblestones behind him said he’d brought his troops with him.

Personal weapon at the ready, Drefsab scrambled over a big gray stone and dropped down into the enclosed area of the castle of Klis. His feet scrunched on dry weeds. Several other males were already there, scurrying around and nervously checking anything that could hide a Big Ugly.

Thus far, they’d found precisely nothing. Drefsab was disappointed-he wanted Skorzeny dead and proved dead. But sealing off this place and taking possession of it for the Race wasn’t bad in and of itself, either. High time to expand the foothold in Croatia beyond the town of Split, he thought.

“They’ve been here,” a male said, pointing to the litter scattered wherever it wasn’t visible from Split. “Why aren’t they here now?” He sounded indignant; to the Race, the world by rights should have been a neatly predictable place.

“They may have timed their attack in town to match ours here,” Drefsab answered. “Their intelligence is revoltingly good.” That didn’t surprise him overmuch; only natural for beings of one kind to stick together against those of another, especially when the latter were trying to conquer them.

He badly wanted a taste of ginger. He’d all but promised the fleetlord that he’d bring back Skorzeny’s head in a clear block of acrylic resin. Would Atvar be content if presented with a mere strategic gain rather than said head? Unless Skorzeny got himself killed and identified back in Split, it looked as if Drefsab would have to find out. Ginger wouldn’t change that, but would keep him from having to think about it for a while.

Another male waved to him from a stone-lined hole in the ground. “Over here, superior sir,” he said. “Looks like the Big Uglies that haunted this place made their home underground.”

Drefsab shone an electric torch into the hole. Even without it, he would have been sure this was a Big Ugly den: the Tosevites’ rank, meaty smell filled the scent receptors on his tongue. He played the torch back and forth, then let out a low hiss. “This place will hold a lot of Big Uglies.”

“That’s true, superior sir,” the male agreed. “Where do you suppose they’ve all gone?”

“Some of them back to their villages, I suppose, and some into town to attack our walls,” Drefsab answered. He stuck out his tongue. The words did not taste right. From all he’d learned of Skorzeny, such a simpleminded frontal assault seemed out of character.

“If you want us to set up camp in this pile of stones, superior sir I hope you don’t expect us to use that place down there.” The soldier also stuck out his tongue, and waggled it in derision and disgust. “It stinks.”

“That it does,” Drefsab said. “And no, I promise you won’t have to set up your sleeping gear down there-not until we fumigate, anyhow.” His mouth and the other male’s dropped open in a laugh.

The speaker built into his helmet suddenly screamed at him: “Superior sir! Superior sir! We’re under attack not just from outside the wall but also from within! Somehow a large party of Big Uglies managed to get inside the walls without being noticed. We’re taking heavy casualties. Need for assistance urgent in the extreme!”

Drefsab made a noise like a pressure cooker forgotten on top of a hot stove. “None of them slipped away to their villages,” he said when coherent speech returned. The male beside him stared in confusion; he hadn’t heard the desperate call. Drefsab went on, “They all went down into Split.” No, Skorzeny wasn’t simpleminded at all.

“Who? The Big Uglies?” the male asked, still trying to figure out what was going on.

Drefsab ignored him. He waved to the soldiers scattered over the castle of Klis. “Back to the helicopters!” he shouted.

“Quick as you can!”

A virtue of the Race was obedience to superiors. The males neither hesitated nor asked questions. They ran toward the helicopters as fast as their legs would take them. Behind the armor-glass windscreens, the pilots waved frantically. They’d got, the message, too, then.

Drefsab dashed up to the cockpit. “To the fortress!” he snarled. “Skorzeny will pay for this. Oh, how he will pay.”

All the pilot said was, “It shall be done.” He pulled up on the collective. The helicopter sprang into the air. It wheeled within its own diameter and darted back toward Split. Only then did the pilot say, “May I ask your plan, superior sir?”

“Use our firepower to blast the Big Uglies out of the fortress,” Drefsab answered. “They may have smuggled in men and rifles; I refuse to believe they could carry antiaircraft weapons into Split without our noticing.”

“No doubt you are right about that, superior sir,” the weapons officer said with all proper deference. “But I see I must remind you that we expended most of our munitions in the bombardment of that empty castle. We have little left to use back at the city.”

Drefsab stared at him in blank dismay. After a moment, he said, “Keep going anyhow. I’ll think of something.” The ground blurred by under the helicopter. He didn’t have much time.

Jager had fought house to house, street to street, in towns and cities in the Ukraine. He’d hated it then. Even with a panzer wrapped around him, it was deadly dangerous work. Doing it in nothing but these ragged clothes struck him as clinically insane. “You’d never get me to join the infantry now,” he muttered, sheltered in the doorway of a building near the wall. “I did that the last war.”

Bullets sprayed past him, biting chips out of stone and brickwork. They stung when they hit; if you got one in the eye, it could blind you. The Lizards all had automatic weapons and, by the way they hosed fire around, they might have had all the ammunition in the world, too. Jager was too aware that he didn’t. The FG-42 was a wonderful weapon, but it went through magazines in a hurry.

Several men in front of him shot back at the Lizards. That was the signal for him and half a dozen fellows with him to leapfrog forward past them. Leaving the doorway was as hard as getting out of a trench and springing across no-man’s-land had been in France a generation ago. But fire and move was how you fought as a foot soldier if you wanted any kind of chance of living to do it again.

He bounded along the cobblestones, bent over as if his belly griped him to make himself as small a target for the Lizards as he could. The men firing hadn’t suppressed all the enemies ahead. Bullets struck sparks from the cobbles close by his feet and ricocheted away at crazy angles.

He’d had a new doorway in mind when he started his dash. He threw himself into it, panting as if he’d just run a marathon rather than a few meters. A moment later, another fellow squeezed in behind him. In Slavic-accented German, he asked, “Think any of the things are inside here?”

Jager made a sour face. “We’re getting up close to their position. It could be.”

“I have grenade,” the Croat said, pulling a German potato-masher model from his belt. He tried a thick wooden door. The knob turned in his hand. That was plenty to make Jager suspicious, and the Croat as well. He unscrewed the grenade’s protective cap, yanked the igniter, opened the door, chucked in the grenade, and slammed it again.

The blast made Jager’s head pound. Fragments rattled off the door. Jager flung it open once more, sprayed a quick burst into the chamber to catch any Lizards the grenade had missed Then he dove behind a massive oaken desk that had probably sat there since the days of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

The Croat ran to the next door in, fired a few rounds from his submachine gun, then peered around the corner. That was the right order in which to do things. He grunted. “I think we maybe are lucky.”

“Better for us to shoot up the place and not need to than to need to and not do it,” Jager said. The Croat nodded. Taking no chances even so, Jager crawled back to the outer doorway. Just as he got there, a blast like a 500-kilo bomb went off to the north. When he ever so cautiously looked out of the doorway, he saw a great hole in the outwall to Diocletian’s palace. The antiquarian in him lamented. The soldier rejoiced-Skorzeny’s raiders had distracted the Lizards enough to let Petrovic’s men lay the explosives next to the wall.

He sprang to his feet, stormed forward. The best time to advance was while the enemy was momentarily stunned. Now the Lizards would have a doubly hard time: they’d have to fight Skorzeny’s men and keep Petrovic’s followers from. getting through the breach in the wall. This mad raid just might work.

Then a stuttering roar filled the sky. Jager dove for the nearest cover he could find. The. Lizard helicopters were coming back.

Split was in flames, with smoke mounting fast into the sky. Drefsab hissed in astonished disbelief-who could have imagined a town could go from peace to ruin in so short a time? “Oh, Skorzeny, how you will pay,” he whispered.

Even as the helicopters reached the outskirts of Split, a big explosion sent a great cloud of dust leaping into the air. “They’ve blown up part of the wall,” the pilot said in dismay, scanning the electronically amplified vision display. “How did they get all these munitions into town under our muzzles?”

“Some have probably been there all along-the Big Uglies were fighting among themselves when we got here, you know. As for the rest, they’re good at it,” Drefsab said bitterly. “We didn’t X-ray every bit of every single animal cart going in, and now we’re paying the price. But if we did that everywhere, we wouldn’t have enough males to do anything else. The fault here is mine; I accept it.”

That made him feel virtuous. Otherwise, it did nothing to change matters. Split kept on burning. Radio calls for help kept pouring in. Every one of them reported some fresh Tosevite gain. “What do we do, superior sir?” the weapons officer asked, fixing Drefsab with worried eyes. “We have no rockets left and our machine-gun ammunition is low.”

Worries about conserving ammunition, Drefsab thought, had cost the Race victories. If they lost here, it wouldn’t be on account of that. “If we don’t expend what we have, our ground position in Split falls,” he said. “Next to that, ammunition-or, come to that, three helicopters-counts for nothing. Maybe we can kill enough of the Big Uglies to make the rest break contact and give our males a chance. Let’s go try.”

“It shall be done, superior sir.” Neither the pilot nor the weapons officer sounded enthusiastic. Drefsab couldn’t blame them for that-even if the Big Uglies didn’t have antiaircraft guns, the helicopters were still going into danger: if they’d armored all the wires and hydraulics heavily enough to protect em from rifle fire, the aircraft would have been too heavy to fly. But the pilot didn’t hesitate. He radioed Drefsab’s orders to his two comrades.

The three helicopters skimmed low over the rooftops of Split. They started taking fire long before they got to the rectangular stone wall the Race had used as a perimeter for its base. Some bullets went spanng! off armored sections; others inched through sheet metal in less vital spots.

Drefsab quickly realized the ground fire away from the fortress came from Big Uglies who just happened to have rifles and pistols. It turned into a storm of bullets when the aircraft approached the fighting zone. “Shall I return fire against the Tosevite males outside the walls, superior sir?” the weapons officer asked.

“No,” Drefsab said. “The ones who got inside are even more important. If we have only limited ammunition, we’ll use at the point of decision.”

Again, the pilot relayed Drefsab’s will to the males flying the other two helicopters. All three machines hovered above the narrowing area inside the walls that the Race still held. The machine guns roared. Drefsab felt a savage surge of satisfaction, almost as good as ginger, as Big Uglies twisted and fell under assault from the air.

“We’ll get them out of there yet!” he cried.

Another doorway. This time, Jager didn’t think it would be cover enough. He kicked in the door and rolled inside, automatic rifle at the ready. No Lizard shot at him. He crawled toward a north-facing window.

Outside, death reigned. He’d hated the Lizards’ helicopters when he was in a panzer. Their rockets smashed through armor as if it were pasteboard. Against infantry, their machine guns were similarly destructive.

The fire wasn’t aimed. It didn’t need to be. As he’d seen in France in the last war, machine guns. put out so many bullets that if this one didn’t get you, the next one would. Without luck amounting to divine intervention, anyone caught on the street without cover would be dead.

The helicopters’ noses seemed to be spitting flame. Jager squeezed off a burst at the nearest of them, then rolled away as fast as he could. He had no idea whether he’d damaged the helicopter, but he was sure as need be that the Lizards would have spotted his muzzle flashes.

Sure enough, bullets battered the wall. Some pierced the stones; others sent shards of glass from the broken window flying like shell fragments. Something bit Jager in the leg. Blood began to soak into his trousers. It wasn’t a flood. He cautiously tried putting weight on the leg. It held. He might not run as fast as usual for a while, but he could move around pretty well. He headed up to the second story of the building. When he got there, he planned on firing another burst at the helicopters. It would also let him deliver plunging fire against the Lizards at the base of the walls He was still on the stairs when the firing from the helicopters died away: first one machine gun fell silent, then a second, then a third.

His first thought was to rush-or come as close as he could to rushing with a sliver of glass in his leg-back down and join the final attack that would sweep away the last of the Lizards. His second thought was that his first one was less than smart. The Lizards surely had imagination enough to stop shooting and see how many men they could fool into thinking they’d run out of ammunition.

He went up to the second floor after all. The helicopters still hung menacingly in the air, but they weren’t shooting. Men on the ground-Skorzeny’s forces and Petrovic’s both-kept blazing away at them, though. Jager fired, too. This time the Lizards didn’t shoot back.

“Maybe you are out of ammo,” he muttered to himself.

Even so, he didn’t hurry downstairs and rush out into the street. Maybe they weren’t out of ammo, too.

Drefsab turned to the weapons officer in anger and dismay when the machine gun stopped firing. “Is that all of it?” he demanded.

“Not quite, superior sir, but almost all,” the fellow answered. “I’ve reserved the last couple of hundred rounds. Whatever decision you make on how or if we use them, though, I suggest you make it quickly. We already have one male wounded back in the fighting compartment, and we can’t stay under such intense fire indefinitely. The odds of any one bullet doing us significant damage are low, but we are encountering a great many bullets.”

That was an understatement. The patter and clatter of incoming rounds all but deafened Drefsab. He said, “The area close to the wall is too built up to let us land and take aboard those of our males who still live.” He added the interrogative cough to that, though it looked pretty plain to him. Maybe the pilot would tell him he was wrong.

But the pilot didn’t “We could fit the fuselages of our marines down there, superior sir, but the rotors-” He didn’t finish the sentence, but Drefsab had no trouble finishing it for him. The pilot went on, “We do still have fuel enough to return to Italia, where the Race holds unchallenged control.” He sounded hopeful.

“No,” Drefsab said flatly. He reached into a pouch on his belt, took out a vial of ginger, and tasted. The pilot and weapons officer gaped at him. He didn’t care. Atvar the fleetlord knew he was addicted, so what these low-grade officers thought mattered not at all to him. He said, “We shall not flee.”

“But, superior sir-” The pilot broke off, perhaps because of drilled subordination, perhaps because he couldn’t decide whether to protest Drefsab’s tactics or the vial of ginger he still held so blatantly in his left hand.

Ginger certainty and ginger cunning rushed through Drefsab. “The Big Uglies can’t have brought all that many males into the fortress,” he said. “If we land behind them, where we took off, we can catch them between two fires, as they’ve done with our males down there.”

Now the pilot had something concrete to which to object: “But, superior sir, we’ve twenty-three effectives at most; I don’t know if anyone aboard the other helicopters is wounded.”

“Thirty,” Drefsab corrected, his voice cold. “Pilots and weapons officers have their personal weapons, and I have mine. If we can drive the Big Uglies from the fortress, we may be able to hold on here long enough for reinforcements to arrive.”

The pilot was still staring. Drefsab deliberately looked away from him, daring him to protest further. To underline his contempt, he tasted again. Ginger filled him with the burning urge to do something and with the confidence that if he just acted boldly, everything would turn out fine.

“Back to the landing area,” he snapped.

“It shall be done, superior sir,” the pilot said miserably. He relayed Drefsab’s command to the other two helicopters.

When the helicopters darted away, Jager hoped with all his heart they were fleeing. But, though the engine noise diminished, it didn’t vanish.

“Where are they going?” he muttered suspiciously. He couldn’t believe they would just up and fly away, not when they’d done such a job of working over the humans’ positions moments before. He tried to think himself into the head of the Lizard commander-Drefsab, Skorzeny had said his name was. The exercise had proved useful over and over again in the Soviet Union. If you could figure out what the other fellow needed to do, you were halfway to keeping him from doing it.

All right, assume this Drefsab was no fool. He wouldn’t be, not if he’d made the Lizards shape up in Besancon (Jager wondered how his regiment was faring; the news out of France-and then out of Germany-hadn’t been good) and been entrusted with swinging the Croats away from Germany.

What to do, then? Those big Lizard helicopters carried soldiers as well as munitions. What would Skorzeny do if he had some men he could put anywhere he wanted? The answer to that formed of itself in Jager’s mind: he’d stick them up the enemy’s rear. He’d done just that, here in Split.

Next question was, would Skorzeny figure that out for himself? He’d better.

Jager couldn’t get in touch with him by radio or field telephone. But Skorzeny was no fool, either. He’d think of something like that… Jager told himself hopefully.

The panzer colonel wondered if he ought to head back toward the rear. Before he made up his mind, he decided to evaluate the position he already held. He moved toward the window, peered out from well back in the room so as not to make himself an obvious target for the Lizards by the wall.

He needed only a couple of seconds to realize he was in too good a place to abandon. He could see four or five Lizards no more than a hundred meters from him, and they didn’t know he was there. He switched the FG-42 from automatic to single shot, raised it, breathed out, and touched the trigger on the exhale. The automatic rifle bucked against his shoulder. One of the Lizards toppled over bonelessly.

Even single-shot, the weapon was a lot faster than a bolt-action rifle. All you had to do was pull the trigger again. He missed a shot at his second Lizard, but his next round was on the way before the creature could react to the one before. He didn’t think he made a clean kill on that Lizard, but he was sure he’d hit it. Getting it out of the fight would definitely do. Instinct made him move away from the window after that. Hardly had he done so when bullets came searching for him. He nodded to himself. If you pushed things too far, you paid for it.

Firing broke out off to the south, at first mostly Lizards’ weapons, then men’s answering back. Jager nodded again. Drefsab was trying to retrieve the situation, all right. He might have been a nasty little alien from the black depths of unknown space, but he knew what fighting was all about.

Drefsab had been trained as an intelligence officer. When he got to Tosev 3, he’d never expected to meet combat face-to-face. His brief forays in a landcruiser at Besancon hadn’t come close to preparing him for what infantry fighting-especially in the heart of a town-was like.

The helicopters had remained under fire all the way to the landing area from which they’d taken off what seemed like a couple of years before. A male was hit exiting through the troop compartment door, and another couple as they skittered toward cover. The weapons officers had used up the last precious rounds in the helicopter machine guns trying to suppress the Big Ugly defenders.

Drefsab had never felt so naked as when sprinting across the cobblestones toward a pile of rubble. Not even ginger’s bravado could make him believe he was invulnerable to the bullets cracking past him. But he reached the rubble without getting hit. He sprawled down behind it and started shooting back.

He didn’t need long to realize only a couple of Tosevites were defending against the males of the Race. The soldiers’ commander figured out the same thing at the same time. His orders crackled in the speaker inside Drefsab’s helmet. Some of the males sprayed bullets at the Big Uglies to make them keep their heads down. Others moved to gain positions from which they could fire at the enemy from the side. Soon the Tosevites were down. The males of the Race ran forward. They hadn’t taken the Big Uglies as much by surprise as Drefsab had hoped. The trouble was, they were fighting in too small a space. An alert commander-and no one had ever faulted the Tosevites for that-could quickly pull some of his males from the fighting near the wall and send them to meet the new threat And the males of the Race trapped against the wall had trouble exploiting that because of the danger from the Big Uglies in the buildings on the other side.

No sooner had that thought crossed Drefsab’s mind than an explosion to the north made him sure another piece of the wall had just gone down. He hissed in dismay. His detachment couldn’t hold the fortress by itself. If the males he was trying to rescue perished, Split would fall.

“Hurry!” he shouted. “We have to fight through the Tosevites and reach them.”

Two of the helicopter pilots were already down. They’d joined the attack bravely enough, but they had even less notion of how to, fight on the ground than Drefsab did. And so many bullets were in the air that the most skilled soldier, if he was unlucky, would fall as readily as anyone else.

Crouched in a doorway, Drefsab tasted again. He needed the spirit ginger brought him. If it drained away, he wouldn’t be able to keep on fighting. So he told himself, at any rate.

One of the buildings ahead, or more than one, had caught fire. Smoke filled the narrow street. A determined male-especially one who was full to bursting with ginger-could take advantage of the cover. Drefsab thought there would be plenty of hiding places ahead. He burst out of the doorway, sprinted, up the street.

He changed directions every few steps. No one would get a good shot at him if he could help it. The thick smoke made him gasp and cough; nictitating membranes slid across his eyes to protect them from the stinging stuff.

Through the smoke, he didn’t see the Tosevite until they almost ran into each other. He hadn’t heard him, either; the din of battle made sure of that. Even for a Big Ugly, this male was enormous. He could have made two of Drefsab.

Weapons were great equalizers, though. As Drefsab swung his toward the Tosevite, he noted that the fellow had a scar on his face, hidden not quite well enough by paint and power. He started to shout, “Skorzeny!”

But Skorzeny had a weapon, too, a rifle of unfamiliar make spat a stream of fire like the automatic rifles of the Race. Something hit Drefsab a series of hammer blows. He felt only the first one or two.

Lizard jets screamed overhead. Thunderous blasts ripped across the area Diocletian’s palace had enclosed. Huddled in a doorway, Jager prayed the building wouldn’t fall down on top of him. He didn’t think much would be left of the palace by the time the bombers were done. Sixteen hundred years of history, blown to hell in an afternoon.

The jets unloaded their last bombs and flew away. Stunned, battered, but with no worse wounds than that chunk of glass in his leg, Jager slowly got to his feet. He looked around at the smoking ruins of what had been a scenic little port. “It’s ours,” he said.

“And a good thing, too,” somebody behind him answered. He whirled. That hurt, but his battle reflexes permitted nothing less. There stood Skorzeny. Sweat had made his makeup run, but his face was so covered with grime and soot that the scar wasn’t easy to spot, anyhow. He went on, “If we’d bogged down there, they might have been able to fly in reinforcements to their soldiers here. That wouldn’t have been much fun.”

“Not even a little bit,” Jager said fervently. He looked around at the wreckage-and the carnage. “They’re tougher than I thought they were.”

“They can fight.” Skorzeny looked around. If the devastation bothered him, he didn’t show it. “We found out the Russians were tougher than we thought, too, but we would have licked them in the end.” Nothing seemed to get him down. Give him a military job, no matter how bizarre or impossible it seemed, and he’d go out and do it.

A Croat aimed his rifle at a Lizard prisoner. “Halt!” Jager shouted as loud as he could-if the Croat understood any German, that would be it.

“Stop that!” Skorzeny echoed, even louder than Jager. “What the bleeding hell do you think you’re doing, you shitheaded syphilitic cretinous puddle of dog puke?”

The Croat understood German, all right. He swung his rifle away from the frightened, cringing Lizard-and halfway toward Skorzeny. “I get rid of this thing,” he said. “Maybe I get rid of you first.”

Most of the men on the battered streets, most of the men who had done the fighting in Split, were Croats, not Germans. A lot of them started drifting over toward Skorzeny and Jager. They didn’t quite aim their weapons at the German officers, but they had them ready. Among them was Captain Petrovic. He looked as ready to get rid of the Germans as any of his troops.

Jager said, “Shooting Lizards is wasteful. They know so much that we don’t. Better to keep them alive and squeeze it out of them.”

The Croat with the rifle spat. “This I care for what they know. I know I enjoy killing this one, so I do it.”

“If you kill that Lizard, I’ll kill you,” Skorzeny said, as casually as if he were sitting over coffee with the Croat. “If you try to kill me, I’ll kill you. Colonel Jager is right, and you damn well know it.”

The Croat’s scowl got blacker yet. He did not move his rifle another centimeter in Skorzeny’s direction, though. Jager gestured to the Lizard: a peremptory come-here. The Lizard skittered over to stand beside him.

“Good,” Skorzeny said softly. He turned to Petrovic, raised his voice: “Order your men to round up the rest of the Lizards and bring them here. From what I’ve heard, we should have twenty or so who surrendered, plus about as many wounded. I want them all there-immediately. They’re as big a haul as this whole town.”

“You want,” Petrovic said coldly. “So what? This is the Independent State of Croatia, not Germany. I give orders here, not you. What do you do if I tell you no?”

“Shoot you,” Skorzeny answered. “If you think I can’t take you out along with your cheerful friend over there”-he jerked his chin at the Croat who had threatened the Lizard-“before your bully boys bring me down, you’re welcome to find out if you’re right.”

Petrovic was no coward. Had he been a coward, he wouldn’t have thrown himself into the middle of the fighting that had just ended. Skorzeny stood, almost at ease, waiting for him to do whatever he would do. Jager did his best to match the SS man’s show of confidence. Matching his gall was something else again.

After a long, long pause, Petrovic barked orders in Serbo-Croatian. One of his men shouted a protest. Petrovic screamed abuse at him. Jager hadn’t picked up much of the local language, but the invective sounded impressive as hell.

The Croats straggled away. A few minutes later, they started coming back with Lizard prisoners, first the males who had given up as the fighting ebbed and then, on makeshift litters, the crudely bandaged ones wounds had forced out of combat. Their sounds of pain were unpleasantly close to the ones men made.

“I wasn’t sure you’d get away with that,” Jager murmured to Skorzeny.

“You have to make it personal,” Skorzeny whispered back. “These bastards take everything personally. I just played their game with them, and I won.” His smile was smug as he added one final word: “Again.”

Georg Schultz said, “I figured I’d get into Moscow one way or another, but I never guessed what those ways would be-first you flew me in, and now I’m retreating into it.”

“It isn’t funny.” Ludmila Gorbunova tore a chunk of black bread with her teeth. Someone handed her a glass of ersatz tea. She gulped it down. Someone else gave her a bowl of shchi. She gulped the cabbage soup, too. While she refueled herself, groundcrew men took care of her aircraft, pouring petrol into it, loading on light bombs, and stowing the belts of machine-gun ammunition Schultz had filled.

“I never said it was funny,” the German said. He looked worn unto death, his skin gray rather than fair, his hair and beard unkempt, grease on his face and tunic-no one had much chance to wash these days. Purple pouches lay under his eyes.

Ludmila was sure she was no more prepossessing. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had more than a couple of hours of sleep at a stretch. Even before the Kaluga line began to unravel, she’d been desperately overtaxed. Since then…

The cry was buy time. When the Germans neared Moscow in 1941, old men, boys, and tens of thousands of women had dug trenches and antitank obstacles to slow their progress. They were out again. How much good their bathers would do against the Lizards when stronger ones had already failed was questionable, but the Soviet capital would not fall without as much of a fight as the Soviet people could put up.

“Ready, Comrade Pilot,” one of the groundcrew men shouted.

Ready or not, Ludmila put down the bowl of shchi-thin, watery stuff, without ham or salami, and without enough cabbage, too-and got up. She climbed wearily into the U-2 biplane. Georg Schultz said, “I hope you come back. I hope we’re still here when you come back.”

Nikifor Sholudenko walked up just in time to hear the panzer-gunner-turned-mechanic say that. The NKVD man bristled. “The penalty for defeatist talk is death,” he said.

Schultz rounded on him. “What’s the penalty for killing the only decent technician this base has?” he retorted. “You do that, you do more to make your side lose than I do by talking.”

“This may be true,” Sholudenko said, “but there is no fixed sentence for it.” His hand fell to the Tokarev pistol he wore on his hip.

Ludmila knew each of them wanted the other dead. Loudly, she said, “Spin my prop, one of you. Save your war with each other until after we’ve held off the Lizards.” If we hold off the Lizards, she added to herself. Had she said that aloud, she wondered whether Sholudenko would have come down on her for defeatism. Probably not. He didn’t want to see her dead-only naked.

The NKVD man and the ex-Wehrmacht sergeant both sprang toward the front of the Kukuruznik Schultz got there first. When he yanked at the prop, Sholudenko had to back way; walking into a spinning prop blade would kill you as surely as a pistol, and a lot more messily.

Buzz! The prop caught; the five-cylinder radial engine spat out acrid exhaust fumes. Ludmila released the brake. The U-2 bounded over the rough airstrip (not really a strip at all, just a stretch of field), picking up speed. Ludmila gave it more throttle, eased the stick back. The ugly little biplane clawed its way into the air.

Even in flight, the U-2 did not go from duckling to swan. Yet, as a mosquito will bite and escape where a horsefly gets noticed and swatted, Kukuruzniks came back from missions more often than any other Soviet planes.

Not much was left of Kaluga. “Ludmila flew over the outskirts of the industrial town. The Germans had wrecked part of when they took it in their drive on Moscow in fall 1941, and the Russians had wrecked more when they took it back later the same year. Whatever they’d left standing, the Lizards had knocked down over the last couple of weeks.

The front lay north of Kaluga these days. The Lizards had cleared a few of the north-south streets through the town so they could move supplies forward. Lorries, some of their manufacture, others captured from the Nazis or the Soviets (some of those Russian-made, others American) rolled along, as if no enemies were to be found for a thousand kilometers.

I may not be much of an enemy, but I’m the best the Soviet Union has here, Ludmila thought. She worked her flaps and rudder, heeled the U-2 over into an attack run on the lorry column she’d spotted.

No one in the column spotted her until she was close enough to open fire. “The mosquito stings!” she hollered, and whooped with glee as Lizards bailed out of the lorries and dove for cover.

Some of them didn’t bail out-some shot back. Bullets snarled past the U-2. Ludmila kept boring in. She pulled the bomb-release handle. The aircraft suddenly got lighter and more maneuverable as weight and drag fell away.

She gunned it for every ruble it was worth, although, with the Kukuruznik, such things were better measured in kopecks. The biplane shook slightly as the bombs exploded behind it. Ludmila looked back over her shoulder. Some of the lorries were burning merrily. Between them and the little bomb craters she’d made, the Lizards wouldn’t be moving much forward on that route for a while.

Pity the U-2 could carry only light bombs. “I don’t just want to block off one road for a while,” Ludmila said, as if a witch might hear and grant her wish. “I want to keep the Lizards from using the whole city.”

What she wanted and what she could do, sadly, were not one and the same. She flew over Kaluga at rooftop height-not that many of the gutted houses and factories still had roofs-shooting at whatever targets she saw. None was as good as that first line of lorries.

The Lizards shot back. After a while, they started shooting the instant she came into range, sometimes before she opened up herself, Time to go, she thought. The Lizards used many more radios than the Red Army did; they must have spread the word that she was buzzing around.

She got out of Kaluga as fast as she could, ducking down between ruined buildings to make herself as nearly unhittable as she could. It must have worked; she escaped with no more damage than a few bullet holes through the fabric covering of the U-2’s wings and fuselage.

She flew off toward the west; the Lizards had to know the air base lay in that direction, and flying into the afternoon sun made her a harder target for gunners in Kaluga. But she zigzagged around a half-burned grove of plum trees and then headed east and north toward the front. With not much standing between the Lizards and Moscow, she had to do all she could, however little that was, to stem the tide of their advance.

Wreckage littered the ground north of Kaluga, the all-too-familiar signs of a Soviet army in disintegration: shattered tanks and armored cars, trench lines reduced to craters by artillery, unburied corpses in khaki. Even zooming by at full throttle, she gagged at the stink of death and decay that filled her nostrils.

Far less Lizard wreckage was strewn about. The Lizards made a point of salvaging their damaged equipment, which accounted for some of the disparity. But most of it sprang from their losing a lot less than their opponents had. That had been a constant of the war since its earliest days.

Artillery boomed and flashed, off toward the east. The Lizards’ guns outranged those of the Red Army, too; from north of Kaluga, they could all but reach Moscow. Ludmila flew toward the guns. If she could shoot up the crews, that would be a good part of a day’s work.

Though retreating, the Red Army hadn’t given up the fight. She heard screams in the air; a ragged pattern of explosions tore up a square kilometer of ground not far ahead of the Kukuruznik “Katyushas!” she cried in high glee. The rockets were some of the best weapons the Soviets had. Unlike more conventional artillery, they were easily portable, and a flight of them not only did a lot of damage but also spread terror.

Some Lizards were just emerging from their hidey-holes after the Katyusha salvo when Ludmila flew by. She opened up with her machine gun. The Lizards dove back into cover. She hoped some of them weren’t fast enough to reach it, but was gone before she could be sure.

As she approached the Lizards’ artillery position, she got down below treetop height. Some of those gun stations had tank chassis with antiaircraft cannon mounted in place of big guns protecting them. If she spotted one of those, she’d sheer off. A hit or two from their shells would turn the U-2 to kindling. She deliberately thought about it in terms of the aircraft rather than herself.

Jinking, weaving, Ludmila came up on the Lizard guns. She didn’t see any of the antiaircraft tanks, so she bored in. “Za rodina! — For the motherland!” she shouted as her thumb came down on the firing button.

Lizard gunners scattered before her, like cockroaches across a kitchen floor when someone comes in with a lamp, Unlike cockroaches, some of them snatched up personal weapons and shot back. Muzzle flashes might have looked pretty as fireflies, but they meant the Lizards were trying to kill her. More thrumming noises spoke of bullets making hits on the Kukuruznik, but the little biplane kept flying.

Ludmila glanced at her fuel gauge. She had a bit more than half a tank left. Time to head for home, she thought regretfully; she hadn’t had such a good day shooting up the Lizards in a long time. But she also knew about stretching her luck. If she tried to go on until she found one more perfect target, she was only too likely to make one instead.

“There will be more tomorrow,” she said, and then laughed at herself. She wouldn’t wait for tomorrow to go out again: as soon as she had more fuel, more bullets, more bombs, she’d be in the air again. They kept using you until they used you up. Then they found somebody else-if they could.

What happens when they run out of everybody? she wondered. The answer came back stark: then we lose. It hadn’t happened yet, no matter how black things sometimes looked. But when the Germans drove on Moscow in 1941, they’d faced Russian winter and fresh troops from Siberia. Now it was the beginning of summer, and if the Red Army had any fresh troops left, Ludmila didn’t know where they might come from.

“Which means the veterans like me will just have to carry the load a while longer,” she said, adding after a moment, “if any veterans like me are left alive.” There was Georg Schultz, but he didn’t really count; he’d started the war on the wrong side. Colonel Karpov had been through the whole thing, but he was more a military administrator than a fighting soldier. Ludmila had nothing against that; Karpov ran his air base as well as a man could in the chaos of a losing war. But it removed him from her list, or what would have been her list had she had anyone to put on it.

She wondered how Heinrich Jager was doing these days. He’d been in it from the start, even if he came from the wrong side, too. The memory of their brief time together in Germany the winter before seemed faded, unreal. What would she do if she ever saw him again? She shook her head. For one thing, it wasn’t likely. For another, how could she know till it happened?

Down on the ground, a man in a khaki Red Army uniform waved his cap as she flew by. She was back over Soviet-held territory now, well away from the bulge northeast of Kaluga where the Lizards were forcing their way toward Moscow. They were concentrating their effort on that push, and had loaded the bulge with troops and weapons. Ludmila dared hope the air base would still be operating when she got back to it.

The U-2 bucked in the air, as if it had taken a hit from an antiaircraft gun. Then the aircraft steadied. Ludmila swore; were Red Army gunners shooting at her again? She checked the sketchy instrument panel. Everything looked fine, though she had trouble reading some of the dials because of the black shadow her head and shoulders cast on them.

She accepted that for a moment. Then she remembered she was flying into the sun.

Even as she wheeled the Kukuruznik through a tight turn, that impossible shadow began to fade. She looked back to see what could have made it; her first guess was a Lizard bomb. The shock wave from a bomb might have made her think she was hit.

But while the flash from a bomb might have given her a momentary shadow, it could hardly have lasted long enough for her to notice it. She figured that out while her head turned ahead of the plane’s motion to see what had happened.

Because she checked the near distance first, she didn’t spot anything right away. Then she raised her eyes a little higher, and felt like the prize fool of all time. The fireball that had printed her shadow on the instrument panel was already dissipating, but not the enormous cloud of dust and wreckage it had raised.

“Bozhemoi-My God,” she whispered. That growing cloud had to be at least twenty-five kilometers off to the east, maybe more. It towered thousands of meters into the air, glowing yellow and pink and salmon and colors for which she had no name. Its shape took her back to fall days before the war, when she and her family would hunt mushrooms in the woods outside Kiev.

“Bozhemoi,” she said again, when what it had to be hit her like a kick in the stomach: one of the Lizards’ explosive-metal bombs, the kind that had flattened Berlin and Washington, D.C. She moaned, back deep in her throat-were the Lizards sealing the rodina’s doom by raining such destruction on it?

The cloud climbed and climbed. Five thousand meters? Six? Eight? She couldn’t begin to guess. She simply watched, stunned, flying the U-2 with hands and feet but without much conscious thought. Little by little, though, as her wits began to work once more, she noticed where the bomb had gone off: not ahead of the Lizards’ lines, to clear the road to Moscow, but right at the front or a little behind it-at a spot where it would hurt the Lizards much more than the Soviet forces opposing them.

Had the Lizards dropped it in the wrong place? She hadn’t thought they made mistakes like that. Or, somehow, had the scientists of the Soviet Union devised an explosive-metal bomb of their own?

“Please, God, let it be so,” she said, and didn’t feel the least bit guilty about praying.

Reports flooded onto Atvar’s desk: video of the nuclear explosion from a spy satellite, confirmation (as if he needed any) from those ground commanders lucky enough not to have been incinerated in the blast, sketchy preliminary lists of units that hadn’t been so lucky.

Kirel came in. Atvar grudged him a brief glance from one eye turret, then went back to plowing through the reports. “Forgive me, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said, “but I have a formal written communication from Straha, shiplord of the 206th Emperor Yower.”

“Give it to me,” Atvar said. Males used formal written communication only when they wanted to get something down on the record.

The communication was to the point: it read, EXALTED FLEETLORD, NOW WHAT?

“You’ve looked at it?” Atvar asked Kirel.

“Yes, Exalted Fleetlord,” the shiplord answered glumly.

“All right. Reply on the usual circuits-no need to imitate this.”

“Yes, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel repeated. “And the reply is?”

“Very simple-just three words: I don’t know.”

Harry Turtledove was born in Los Angeles in 1949. He has taught ancient and medieval history at UCLA, Cal State Fullerton, and Cal State L.A., and has published a translation of a ninth-century Byzantine chronicle, as well as several scholarly articles. He is also an award-winning full-time writer of science fiction and fantasy. His alternate history works have included several short stories and novels, including The Guns of the South, How Few Remain (winner of the Sidewise Award for Best Novel), the Great War epics: American Front and Walk in Hell, and the Colonization books: Second Contact and Down to Earth. His new novel is American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold. He is married to fellow novelist Laura Frankos. They have three daughters: Alison, Rachel, and Rebecca.