In the Balance

“Hitler’s fried egg?” Ludmila echoed in delicious amazement. She noticed her escorts were ostentatiously pretending they hadn’t noticed that. She shook her head. “My, we’ll have a lot to talk about.”

“Yes we will.” For a moment Jager’s face assumed the watchful expression she’d first seen at the Ukraiman kolkhoz. Then the smile came back. “Yes, we will,” he repeated. “Quite a lot.”

18

Atvar stared out at the assembled shiplords. They silently stared back. He tried to gauge their mood before he called the meeting to order. Nothing short of mutiny-maybe not even that-would have surprised him. Well past one of the Race’s years into a campaign expected to be a walkover, no one had yet turned one eye turret, let alone two, toward victory.

The fleetlord decided to confront that head-on: “Assembled males, I know we face new problems almost every day on Tosev 3. Sometimes we are even forced to face old problems over again, as in the Tosevite empire called Italia.”

The shiplord Straha stood, crouched, and waited to be recognized. When Atvar pointed to him, he asked, “How did the Deutsche manage to kidnap what’s-his-name-the Big Ugly in charge of Italia-”

“Mussolini,” Atvar supplied.

“Thank you, Exalted Fleetlord. Yes, Mussolini. How did the Deutsche manage to steal him when we shut him up in that castle away from everything after he had surrendered his empire to us?”

“How they learned where he was, we do not know,” Atvar admitted. “They are skilled at such irregular warfare, and I must concede the move has embarrassed us.”

“Embarrassed us? I should say so.” Straha added an emphatic cough. “His radio broadcasts from Deutschland negate much of the value we got from that Big Ugly from Warsaw, the one who spoke so convincingly against the Deutsche.”

“Russie,” Atvar said after a quick glance at a tickler file on the computer screen in front of him. The file also told him something else: “We’d reached the point of diminishing returns with that one in any case. His last statement had to be electronically altered to make it conform to our requirements.”

“The Big Uglies have not yet adjusted themselves to the idea that the Race will rule over them,” the shiplord Kirel said mournfully.

“And why should they?” Straha retorted, his voice dripping sarcasm. “As far as I can see, they have no reason to. This affair with Mussolini is but one more embarrassment in a long series. Now Italia seethes with sabotage, where before it was among the calmest of the empires under our control”

Feneress, a male of Straha’s faction, chimed in, “Moreover, it lets the Deutsche make a folk hero of this”-he checked his own computer for the name he sought-“this Skorzeny who led the raid, and encourages other Tosevites to try to emulate his feat.”

Kirel started to come to Atvar’s defense, but the fleetlord held up a hand. “What you say is true, Feneress,” he replied. “For his failure, the male in charge of the Big Ugly Mussolini’s security would normally have found himself liable to severe disciplinary action. As, however, he perished in the Tosevite raid, this has become impracticable.”

The assembled shiplords stirred and murmured among themselves. For the fleetlord to admit failure so frankly was strange and untoward. No wonder they murmured they had to be trymg to figure out what Atvar’s concession meant Did it signal a change in strategy? Did it mean Atvar would resign his post perhaps in favor of Straha? If so, what did that imply for each shiplord?

Atvar raised his hand again. Slowly, the murmurs died away. The fleetlord said, “I did not summon you to the bannership to dwell on failure, assembled shiplords. On the contrary. I summoned you here to outline a course which, I believe, will give us victory.”

The officers stirred and murmured all over again. Some of them, Atvar knew, had begun to despair of victory. Others still thought it could be attained, but the means they wanted to use would leave Tosev 3 a ruin unfit for settlement by the colonization fleet now traveling across interstellar space toward the planet. If he could prove them wrong and still make the Big Uglies submit, Atvar would be ahead indeed. And he thought he could.

He said, “We have been discomfited by the disturbingly advanced technology the Tosevites have demonstrated. Were it not for those advances-those causes we are still investigating-the conquest of Tosev 3 would have been routine.”

“And we all would have been a lot happier,” Kirel put in. Atvar saw shiplords’ mouths fall open. That they could still laugh was a good sign.

“We have been perhaps slower than we should in appreciating the implications of the Big Uglies’ technology,” the fleetlord said. “Compared to the Tosevites, the Race is slow. They have used that fact to their advantage against us. But we are also thorough. Compare our Empire, the Empire, to the ephemeral makeshift empires and irrational administrative schemes under which they live. And now we have found a flaw in their technology which we hope we can exploit.”