Tilting the Balance

“I know what you mean,” his cousin answered. “Everyone here keeps thinking we’re about to make off with the good silver. I shan’t be sorry to see the last of that myself. If all goes well, we should have you and yours back in England in a couple of weeks. How does that strike you?”

“The word that comes to mind is mechaieh,” Moishe said. His cousin grinned and clapped him on the back.

“Hurry up!” Ludmila Gorbunova shouted. “If I don’t get the ammunition into my machine gun, how am I supposed to shoot it at the Lizards?”

“Patience, patience,” Georg Schultz answered as he checked the belts that fed the guns. “If your weapon jams when you’re taking it into action, you might as well not have it. Do things right at first and you won’t be sorry later.”

Nikifor Sholudenko paused before he passed Schultz another belt. “The Soviet Union is not your country,” he observed. “To you it means little if Sukhinichi falls. To us it means Moscow is in danger, just as it was from your fascists in 1941.”

“Screw Moscow,” Schultz answered, sending the NKVD man a glance redolent of dislike. “If Sukhinichi falls, it probably means I get shot. You think that doesn’t matter to me, you’re crazy.”

“Enough, you two,” Ludmila said. She’d been saying that ever since the German and the security man met. She’d kept them from trying to kill each other on the tramp back to the village where they’d shot it out with the anti-Tolokonnikovites (she still didn’t know who Tolokonnikov’s was or what sort of faction he led), and sometimes kept them from sniping at each other with words for as long as half an hour.

“You be careful up there,” Schultz told her, in the not-to-be-denied tones of a field marshal giving orders-or a man who wanted to go to bed with her. She knew which only too well. Wanting to go to bed with her was the only thing on which he and Sholudenko agreed. The air base had needed a political officer when Sholudenko got there, but that wasn’t the only reason Sholudenko had arranged to stay on here, even if it was the official one.

In a way, climbing into the cockpit of her new U-2 was a relief. She didn’t have to argue with the Lizards or cajole them along; all they wanted to do was kill her. Avoiding that was a lot simpler than the passes from Schultz and Sholudenko she kept ducking.

Schultz spun the prop. He’d been right about one thing-Colonel Karpov had been so glad to have his mechanical talents back that he’d overlooked the little matter of going off without bothering to get permission first. That Schultz had actually returned with Ludmila hadn’t hurt there, either.

The Kukuruznik’s little five-cylinder radial buzzed into life. It had a note slightly different from the one she’d grown used to, but Schultz insisted that was nothing to worry about. On engines, if not many other places, Ludmila trusted his word.

She released the brake, gave the biplane full throttle, and bounced across the still-muddy steppe till she was airborne. She stayed at treetop height as she flew south and west toward the front. One rule the Red Air Force had learned: the higher you flew against the Lizards, the less likely you were to come back.

The front south of Sukhinichi was not far away, and got closer all the time whether she was in the air or not. With the coming of good weather, the Lizards were on the move again, pushing through German remnants and Soviet troops alike as they advanced on Moscow. By crackling shortwave Stalin had ordered, “Ni shagu nazad! — Not one step back!” Giving the order and being strong enough to make sure it was obeyed were not the same thing, worse luck.

The Red Army had brought up all the artillery it could to try to stem the Lizard tide. Ludmila flew past bare-chested young men in khaki trousers serving their guns for all they were worth. When a cannon, or sometimes a whole battery, discharged close by, the blast made the U-2 tremble in the air like a falling leaf caught by a gust of wind. The gun crews waved at her plane, not because they knew she was a woman, but for joy at seeing anything human-built in the air.

Tanks rumbled along the dirt roads. Some of them spewed smoke to help mask their positions. Ludmila hoped that would do some good; going up against Lizard armor was worse than facing the Germans. The Nazis had had better tactics but worse tanks. The Lizards’ tanks were better than the T-34s and KV-1s that were the pride of Soviet armored forces, and their tactics weren’t bad, either.

A curtain of dust thrown up from shell hits marked the front. Ludmila took a deep breath as she drew near; every second she spent in and around that curtain or on the other side was a second in which she was hideously more likely to die than at any other time. Her bowels clenched and loosened, her bladder felt very full though it wasn’t. She noticed none of that, not consciously.