Striking the Balance

As usual, the light plane needed only a handful of ground on which to take off. After one last hard bump, it sprang into the air. Jager leaned to one side to peer down at the landing strip. So did Ludmila, but there wasn’t much to see. Now that they were airborne, the fellows with the lanterns had doused them. She supposed-she hoped-they were helping Jager’s crewmen get the ammunition either under cover or back into the regimental store.

Over her shoulder, she asked him, “Are you all right?”

“Pretty much so,” he answered. “They hadn’t done much of the strongarm stuff yet-they weren’t sure how big a traitor I am.” He laughed bitterly, then amazed her by going on, “A lot bigger than they ever imagined, I’ll tell you that. Where are we going?”

Ludmila was swinging theStorch back toward the east. “I was going to take you to the partisan unit I’ve been with for a while. No one will try and come after you there, I shouldn’t think; we’ll have a good many kilometers between us and German-held territory. Is that good enough?”

“No, not nearly,” he said, again surprising her. “Can you fly me down to Lodz? If you like, you can let me out of the airplane and go back to the partisans yourself. But I have to go there, no matter what.”

“Why?” She could hear the hurt in her own voice. Here at last they had the chance to be together and stay together and… “What could be so important in Lodz?”

“That’s a long story,” Jager said, and then proceeded to compress it with a forceful brevity that showed his officer’s discipline. The more he talked, the wider Ludmila’s eyes got-no, the SS hadn’t arrested him on account of her, not at all. He finished, “And so. If I don’t get back into Lodz, Skorzeny is liable to blow up the town and all the people and Lizards in it. And if he does that, what becomes of the cease-fire? What becomes of theVaterland? And what becomes of the world?”

Ludmila didn’t answer for a few seconds. Then, very quietly, she said, “Whatever you call yourself, you weren’t a traitor.” She gained a little altitude before swinging theStorch in a rightward bank. Numbers spun round the dial of the compass on the instrument panel till it steadied on south-southeast “We’ll both go to Lodz,” Ludmila said.

XIX

Ttomalss must have slept through the opening of the outer door to the building that confined him. The sharp click of the lock to the inner door, though, brought him up to his feet from the hard floor, his eye turrets swiveling wildly as he tried to see what was going on. Next to no light came through the narrow window that illuminated and ventilated his cell.

Fear coursed through him. The Big Uglies had never come here at night before. Like any male of the Race, he found a break in routine threatening in and of itself. This particular change, he suspected, would have felt ominous even to a Tosevite.

The door opened. Not one but three Big Uglies came in. Each carried in one hand a lantern burning some smelly fat or oil and in the other a submachine gun. The lanterns were primitive: much the sort of tools the Race had expected the natives of Tosev 3 to possess. The submachine guns, unfortunately, were not.

In the dim, flickering light, Ttomalss needed a moment to recognize Liu Han. “Superior female!” he gasped when he did. She did not answer right away, but stood looking at him. He commended his spirit to Emperors past, confident they would care for it better than the Race’s authorities had protected his body while he lived.

“Be still!” Liu Han snapped. Ttomalss waited for the weapon in her hand to stitch him full of holes. Instead of shooting him, though, she set it on the floor. She pulled out something she had tucked into the waist of her cloth leg-covering: a sack made of coarse, heavy fabric.

While the two males with her kept their submachine guns pointed at Ttomalss, Liu Han came up to him and pulled the sack down over his head. He stood frozen, not daring to resist.If they shoot me now, I will not see the guns go off before the bullets strike, he thought. Liu Han tied the bag closed around his neck, not quite tight enough to choke off his breath.

“Can he see?” one of the males asked. Then the fellow spoke directly to Ttomalss: “Can you see, miserable scaly devil?”

Miserable Ttomalss was. “No, superior sir,” he answered truthfully.

Liu Han shoved him. He almost fell over. When he recovered, she put a hand in the middle of his back. “You walk in the directions I choose for you,” she said, first in Chinese and then in the language of the Race. “Only in those directions.” She used an emphatic cough.

“It shall be done,” Ttomalss gasped. Maybe they were just taking him out to shoot him somewhere else. But if they were, wouldn’t they have told him as much, so they could enjoy his terrified anticipation? Big Uglies were dreadfully sophisticated when it came to inflicting pain.