In the Balance

“Das ist die Frage,” Sergeant Schultz said solemnly, for all the world like a Nazi Hamlet.

Jager’s mouth quirked up once more. This time, he raised an eyebrow, too. Ludmila found herself smiling back, if only to show that she’d noticed the allusion and was no uncultured peasant. The German turned serious: “We must find places and situations where they cannot use to best advantage all they have.”

“As the partisans fight behind your lines?” Ludmila asked, hoping to flick him on a raw spot.

But he only nodded. “Exactly so. We are all partisans now, when set against the forces we aim to oppose.”

Somehow, his refusal to take offense irritated her. Brusquely, she pointed back toward her airplane. “The two of you will have to go into the front cabin side by side. Keep your machine pistols if you like; I do not try to take your arms away. But, Sergeant, I hope you will leave your rifle behind here. It will not”-she had to pantomime the word “fit”-“in a small space, and may help the kolkhozniks against the Lizards.”

Schultz glanced to Jager. Ludmila eased fractionally when she saw the major give an almost invisible nod. Schultz presented the Mauser to Kliment Pavlyuchenko with a flourish. Startled at first, the collective farm chief folded him into a bear hug. When the sergeant broke free, he went through his pockets for every round of rifle ammunition he could find. Then he set a foot in the stirrup and climbed up into the U-2.

Jager followed him a moment later. The space into which they were crammed was so tight that they ended up sitting half facing each other, each with an arm around the other’s back. “Would you care to kiss me, sir?” Schultz asked. Jager snorted.

Ludmila had the back cabin, the one with working controls, to herself. At her shouted direction, a kolkhoznik spun the little biplane’s prop. The sturdy radial engine buzzed to life. The two Germans set their jaws against the noise but otherwise ignored it. She remembered they had their own intimate acquaintance with engine noise.

When she saw all the peasants were clear of her takeoff path, she released the brakes, eased the stick forward. The Kukuruznik needed a longer run than she’d expected before it labored into the air. A sedate performer under the best of conditions, it was positively sluggish-or, better, sluglike-with more than three times the usual crew weight aboard. But it flew. The collective farm receded behind it as it made its slow way north.

“Be alert for Big Uglies, both of you,” Krentel warned from the cupola of the landcruiser.

“It shall be done, commander,” Ussmak agreed. The driver wished the male newly in charge of the landcruiser would shut up and let the crew do their jobs.

“It shall be done,” Telerep echoed. Ussmak envied the way Jager the gunner could keep the faintest hint of scorn from his voice. What Telerep had to say privately about Krentel would addle an egg, but he was all respect when the landcruiser commander was around.

Males of the Race learned to show respect from their smallest days, but Telerep was unusually smooth even by that high standard. Maybe, Ussmak thought, his low-voiced gibes about Krentel were a reaction to the need for public deference. Or maybe not. Telerep had never talked that way about Votal when the previous commander was alive.

Thinking about Votal made Ussmak think about the Big Uglies who had killed him, and did more to make him alert than all of Krentel’s warnings. The natives of Tosev 3 had learned in a hurry that they could not oppose the Race landcruiser against landcruiser, aircraft against aircraft. That lesson should have marked the end of conquest and the beginning of consolidation. So officers had promised the males of the invasion force when battle commenced.

The promises had not come true. The Big Uglies stopped throwing hordes of males and landcruisers and planes into the grinder to be minced up, but they hadn’t stopped fighting. Thus this landcruiser squadron kept rolling over the broad, cool steppeland of the SSSR, seeking to flush out a band of Tosevite raiders and bushwhackers who had shown up on a reconnaissance photo the day before.

A wail from the sky-“Rockets!” Telerep shrieked. Ussmak had already slammed the hatch shut over his head. A moment later, a metallic clang in the button taped to his hearing diaphragm announced that Krentel had done the same. Ussmak twiddled his fingers in approval: previous appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, the new commander, wasn’t a complete idiot.

The salvo of rockets slammed down all around the land-cruisers. Their warheads kicked up great gouts of earth, blinding one of Ussmak’s vision slits. Closed in as he suddenly was, he couldn’t hear very much, but he knew he would have heard a landcruiser going up. When he didn’t, he took it for a good sign.