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Such thoughts were dangerous. Ludmila knew that, too. The purges of the thirties had swept through Kiev as they had everywhere else in the Soviet Union. One day a teacher would be there, the next day vanished. You learned not to ask where he’d gone, not unless you wanted to join him there.

Ludmila shook her head, as if to drive the worries out of it. She peered down at the ground again, squinted to sharpen her vision as much as she could. That plume of dust there in the distance-she squinted harder. “Yes, those are tanks down at the bottom of it, may the Devil’s grandmother run away with them,” she said.

The Kukuruznik had had a radio fitted when Ludmila went from night harassment to reconnaissance she did not use it. Aircraft that used radio around the Lizards generally did not last long afterward; her information, while she thought it important, didn’t seem worth dying for.

She banked away from the Lizards’ base. She wondered if her own base would still be there when she landed. The new invaders, like the old, pounded every airstrip they could find. But the so-called strip had been only a length of smooth steppe, and she could find another such strip at need. The U-2 didn’t need much room in which to set down.

Even when she got to the airstrip, she had to circle twice to be sure it was there. Camouflage nettings and sod roofs disguised the few buildings. A couple of kilometers away stood a strip camouflaged not quite so well. The Lizards had already bombed it twice. That was all right, or better than all right. The planes there were dummies, the buildings repaired every night but uninhabited.

Her teeth clicked together as the Wheatcutter bounced to a halt. Ludmila scrambled down to the ground while the prop was still spinning. The instant it stopped, groundcrew men threw grass-covered nets over the biplane and hauled it away to hide under still more nets which concealed earthen blast barriers.

Ludmila pulled up a corner of, the command shack’s camouflage net, hurried through the doorless entrance, let the net fall behind her. With netting over all the windows, the interior of the shack was gloomy. “I return, Comrade Major,” she announced.

“So you do, Comrade Pilot,” Major Yelena Popova said, returning her salute. “You are most skilled, or most fortunate, or both.” In the space of a sentence, she went from mild greeting to pure business: “Tell me at once what you saw.”

Ludmila obeyed. Major Popova scowled when she mentioned the four new flying towers on the ground. “These-creatures-swarm onto the soil of the rodina-the motherland-like locusts.”

“Yes, Comrade Major, and they consume all before them like locusts, too.” Ludmila described the column of tanks she’d observed.

The squadron commander’s frown, never pleasant, grew downright fearsome. “This is vital information. Those above us must learn of it at once. I shall use the radio. Repeat your statement to me, that I may be sure to report it accurately.”

As Ludmila obeyed, Major Popova wrote down what she said, then repeated it back. When Ludmila nodded to show it was right, the major went over to the radio. It and its battery were stowed in a wheelbarrow and covered with hay. Yelena took the wheelbarrow out through the door, started in the direction of the dummy airstrip. To anyone-say, a Lizard-in a plane, she looked like a peasant shambling along.

Ludmila watched her slow progress across the plain. Then the tiny shape that was she disappeared into one of the Potemkin sheds. She emerged a bare minute later, moving much faster than she had on the way over.

Seemingly out of nowhere, a rocket slammed into the empty shed. Flames leapt up from it. The deception team would have, a lot of work to do tonight, Ludmila thought. After the rocket hit, Major Popova slowed down again. Ludmila did not blame her. Weighted down by radio and battery, the wheelbarrow was heavy.

“The Lizards are very good at picking up radio signals,” the major said as she arrived at the real airstrip. She wiped her forehead. Her sleeve came away dark with sweat. But her eyes, narrow and black like a Tatar’s, gleamed in triumph.

Even though the breeze was chilly against his muzzle, landcruiser driver Ussmak preferred moving along unbuttoned when he could. The periscopes didn’t give him nearly the view he enjoyed with his head out. Besides, being cooped up in the driver’s compartment reminded him too much of the cold-sleep coffin in which he’d hibernated away the years between Home and Tosev 3.

He had an audio button taped to one hearing diaphragm. “Better get down, Ussmak,” said Votal, the landcruiser commander. “Airscouts report Big Ugly landcruisers ahead.”

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Все книги серии Worldwar

In the Balance
In the Balance

War seethed across the planet. Machines soared through the air, churned through the seas, crawled across the surface, pushing ever forward, carrying death. Earth was engaged in a titanic struggle. Germany, Russia, France, China, Japan: the maps were changing day by day. The hostilities spread in ever-widening ripples of destruction: Britain, Italy, Africa… the fate of the world hung in the balance. Then the real enemy came. Out of the dark of night, out of the soft glow of dawn, out of the clear blue sky came an invasion force the likes of which Earth had never known-and worldwar was truly joined. The invaders were inhuman and they were unstoppable. Their technology was far beyond our reach, and their goal was simple. Fleetlord Atvar had arrived to claim Earth for the Empire. Never before had Earth's people been more divided. Never had the need for unity been greater. And grudgingly, inexpertly, humanity took up the challenge. In this epic novel of alternate history, Harry Turtledove takes us around the globe. We roll with German panzers; watch the coast of Britain with the RAF; and welcome alien-liberators to the Warsaw ghetto. In tiny planes we skim the vast Russian steppe, and we push the envelope of technology in secret labs at the University of Chicago. Turtledove's saga covers all the Earth, and beyond, as mankind-in all its folly and glory-faces the ultimate threat; and a turning point in history shows us a past that never was and a future that could yet come to be…

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Tilting the Balance
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World War II screeched to a halt as the great military powers scrambled to meet an even deadlier foe. The enemy's formidable technology made their victory seem inevitable. Already Berlin and Washington, D.C., had been vaporized by atom bombs, and large parts of the Soviet Union, the United States, and Germany and its conquests lay under the invaders' thumb. Yet humanity would not give up so easily, even if the enemy's tanks, armored personnel carriers, and jet aircraft seemed unstoppable. The humans were fiendishly clever, ruthless at finding their foe's weaknesses and exploiting them. While Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Togo planned strategy, the real war continued. In Warsaw, Jews welcomed the invaders as liberators, only to be cruelly disillusioned. In China, the Communist guerrillas used every trick they knew, even getting an American baseball player to lob grenades at the enemy. Though the invaders had cut the United States practically in half at the Mississippi River and devastated much of Europe, they could not shut down America's mighty industrial power or the ferocious counterattacks of her allies. Whether delivering supplies in tiny biplanes to partisans across the vast steppes of Russia, working furiously to understand the enemy's captured radar in England, or battling house to house on the streets of Chicago, humanity would not give up. Meanwhile, an ingenious German panzer colonel had managed to steal some of the enemy's plutonium, and now the Russians, Germans, Americans, and Japanese were all laboring frantically to make their own bombs. As Turtledove's global saga of alternate history continues, humanity grows more resourceful, even as the menace worsens. No one could say when the hellish inferno of death would stop being a war of conquest and turn into a war of survival-the very survival of the planet. In this epic of civilizations in deadly combat, the end of the war could mean the end of the world as well.

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