In the Balance

As if to turn away from that unpleasant reflection, Atvar said, “For all the bluster the Big Ugly envoys show, they may yet prove tractable. The male from the empire called Deutschland, despite his sickness, showed some comprehension of our might.” All at once, he remembered that Molotov had said Deutschland was a not-empire. He wondered queasily if its emperor had been murdered, too.

Shiplord Kirel said, “Deutschland? Interesting. May I use your screen to show you an image a reconnaissance satellite caught for us yesterday?” Atvar opened, his hands wide to show assent. Kirel punched commands in the 127th Emperor Hetto’s data storage system.

The screen lit to show green land and grayish sea. A spot of fire appeared in one corner of the land, not far from a clump of big wood buildings. The fire suddenly spread and got brighter, then went out more slowly. “One of our bombing runs?” Atvar asked.

“No. Let me show it to you again, this time in slow motion with maximum magnification and image processing.”

The amplified image came up on the screen. Atvar stared at it, then at Kirel. “That is a missile he said accusingly as if it were the shiplord’s fault. He did not want to believe what he had just seen.

But Kirel said, “Yes, Exalted Fleetlord, this is a missile, or at least was intended to be one. Since it exploded on its launching pad, we are unable to gain estimates of its range or guidance system, if any, but to judge from its size, it appears more likely to be strategic than tactical.”

“I presume we have eradicated this site,” Atvar said.

“It was done, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel agreed.

The shiplord’s doleful voice told Atvar what he already knew: even though this site was gone, the Race had no sure way of telling how many others the Deutsche possessed-until a missile roared toward them. And swatting missiles out of, the sky was an order of magnitude harder than dealing with these slow, clumsy Tosevite airplanes. Even the airplanes were hurting his forces now and again, because the Big Uglies kept sending them out no matter how many got knocked down. As Kirel bad said, their courage and skill went some of the way toward making up for their poor technology.

“We have to destroy the factories in which these weapons are produced,” Atvar said.

“Yes Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel answered.

Not, Atvar noted, “It shall be done.” From the air, one factory looked like another. Destroying all the factories in Deutschland was a tall order. Compared to the size of the planet, Deutschland was a small empire, but even small empires, Atvar was learning, covered a lot of ground. The other Tosevite empires had factories, too. How close were they to making missiles?

The fleetlord did his best to look on the bright side. “Their failure gives us the warning we need. We shall not be taken unawares even if they succeed in launching missiles at us.” We had better not be, his tone said.

“Our preparations are adequate,” Kirel said. He did his best to keep on sounding businesslike and military, but his voice had an edge to it that Atvar understood perfectly well: if that was the bright side, it was hardly worth looking for.

The train chuffed to a halt somewhere on the south Russian steppe; men in field gray sprang down and went efficiently to work. They would have been more efficient still, Karl Becker thought, if they’d been allowed to proceed in their usual methodical fashion rather than at a dead run. But an order from the Fuhrer was an order from the Fuhrer. At the dead run they went.

“The ground will not be adequately prepared, Karl,” Michael Arenswald said sadly. Both men were part of the engineering detachment of Heavy Artillery Battalion Dora.

“This is true, of course,” Becker said with a fatalistic nod, “but how many shots are we likely to be able to fire before the Lizards descend on us?” They were sixty kilometers from the Lizard base. With aircraft, though, especially the ones the Lizards flew, sixty kilometers passed in the blink of an eye. Karl Becker was a long way from stupid; he recognized a suicide mission when he heard one.

If Arenswald did, too, he kept it to himself. “We might even get off half a dozen before they figure out what’s happening to them.”

“Oh, quatsch!” said Becker, a Berliner. He jabbed an index finger out at his friend. “You are a dead man, I am a dead man, we are all dead men, the whole battalion of us. The only question left unanswered is whether we can take enough Lizards with us to make our deaths worth something.”

“Sooner or later, we are all dead men.” Arenswald laughed. “We’ll give them a surprise before we go, at any rate.”