In the Balance

“As you say,” Bagnall agreed. The pilot’s couple of sentences told the same story as his own bank of instruments: the aircraft would not make it back to England. He pointed. “There’s as likely a stretch of highway as we’re apt to find. One thing for the war-we’re not likely to run over Uncle Pierre’s Citroen.”

“Right.” Embry raised his voice. “Crew prepare for crash landing. Mr. Bagnall, lower the landing gear, if you please.”

The right wheel descended smoothly; without hydraulics, the left refused to budge. Bagnall worked the hand crank. From the belly turret, a gunner said, “It’s down. I can see it.”

“One thing fewer to worry about,” Embry remarked, with what seemed to Bagnall to be quite excessive good cheer. Then the pilot added, “That leaves only two or three hundred thousand, unless I miss my count.”

“We could be trying this up in Normandy, where the hedge-rows grow right alongside the roadbed,” Bagnall said helpfully.

Embry corrected himself: “Two things fewer. You do so relieve my mind, George.”

“Happy to be of service,” Bagnall answered. Joking about what was going to happen was easier than just sitting back and watching it. A forced landing in a damaged aircraft on a French road in the middle of the night without lights was not easy to contemplate in cold blood.

As if to underscore that, Embry said, “Aircrew may bail out if they find that preferable to attempting a landing. I shall endeavor to remain airborne an extra minute or two to allow them to avail themselves of the opportunity. Had we suffered this misfortune a month ago, I would bail out myself and permit the aircraft to crash, thus denying it to the Germans. As you have seen this evening, however, that situation has for the moment changed. If you do intend to, parachute, please so inform me at this time.”

The intercom stayed silent until someone in the back of the plane said, “You’ll get us down all right, sir.”

“Let us hope such touching confidence is not misplaced,” Embry said. “Thank you, gentlemen, one and all, and good luck to you.” He brought the stick forward, reduced power to the two surviving Merlins.

“To us,” Bagnall amended. The road, a dark gray line arrowing through black fields, was almost close enough to reach out and touch. Embry brought the Lanc’s nose up a little, cut power still more. The bomber met the road with a bump, but Bagnall had been through worse landings at Swinderby. Cheers erupted in the intercom.

Then, just as the Lancaster slowed toward a stop, its right wing clipped a telegraph pole. It spun clockwise. The left landing gear went off the asphalt and into soft dirt. It buckled. The wing snapped off where the shells bad chewed it. The stump dug into the ground. The aircraft’s spars groaned like a man on the rack. Bagnall wondered if it would flip over. It didn’t. Even as it was spinning, Embry had shut off the engines altogether.

Into sudden silence, a second round of cheers rang out. “Thank you, friends,” Embry said. Now at last, when it no longer mattered, he let himself sound wrung out. He turned to Bagnall with a tired grin. “Est-ce que vous parlez francais, monsieur?”

“Hell, no,” Bagnall answered. They both laughed like schoolboys.

4

A metallic rumble echoed through 127th Emperor Hetto as the transfer craft’s airlock engaged with one of the bannership’s docking collars. A speaker chimed softly in Fleetlord Atvar’s office. “The Tosevite is here, Exalted Fleetlord,” a junior officer announced.

“Fetch him hither,” Atvar said.

“It shall be done.”

Atvar hung in midair as he awaited the arrival of the Tosevite official. He’d ordered the spin taken off the bannership when he began receiving natives. He was used to free-fall; while he did not particularly enjoy it, he endured it without trouble, as did his crew. The Tosevites, however, were without space travel. Finding themselves weightless might fluster them and put them at a disadvantage. Atvar hoped so, at any rate.

He let his jaws fall open in amusement as he remembered the unfortunate native from the empire called Deutschland who had lost all his stomach contents, luckily while still in the transfer craft. That poor befuddled Ribbensomething had been in no state even to try to negotiate his empire’s submission to the Empire.

The door to the office opened. An officer charged with learning the appropriate Tosevite dialect floated outside along with the native for whom he would interpret. The officer said, “Exalted Fleetlord, I present to you the emissary of the empire called the Soyuz Sovietskikh Sotzialesticheskikh Respublik-SSSR for short. His name is Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov.”

“Give him my polite greetings,” Atvar answered, thinking the Tosevite empire was too small to deserve such a big name. Like most Tosevites, though, the emissary himself was substantially larger than the fleetlord.