Tilting the Balance

“I am Hessef,” one of them said, coming forward. “By your paint, you must be my new driver.”

“Yes, superior sir.” Ussmak put more respect into his voice than he truly felt. Hessef was a jittery-looking male, his body paint sloppily applied. Ussmak’s own paint was none too neat, but he thought commanders should adhere to a higher standard.

Another male came up to stand beside Hessef. “Ussmak, I introduce you to Tvenkel, our gunner,” the landcruiser commander said.

“Be good to have a whole crew again, go out and fight,” Tvenkel said. Like Hessef, he couldn’t quite hold still. His body paint was, if possible, in even worse shape than the landcruiser commander’s-smeared, blotched, daubed on in a hurry. Ussmak wondered what he’d done to deserve becoming part of this substandard crew.

Hessef said, “Sitting around the barracks all day with nothing to do is as boring as staying awake while you go into cold sleep.”

Then why aren’t you out tending to your landcruiser? Ussmak thought. But that wasn’t something he could say, not to his new commander. Instead, he answered, “Boredom I know all about, superior sir. I just spent a good long while in a hospital ship, recovering from radiation sickness. There were times when I thought I’d been in that cubicle forever.”

“Yes, that could be bad, just staring at the metal walls,” Hessef agreed. “Still, though, I think I’d sooner stay in a hospital ship than in this ugly brick shed that was never made for our kind.” He waved to show what he meant. Ussmak had to agree: the barracks was indeed a dismal place. He suspected even Big Uglies would have found themselves bored here.

“How did you get through the days?” Tvenkel asked. “Recovering from sickness makes time pass twice as slowly.”

“For one thing, I have every video from the hospital ship’s library memorized,” Ussmak said, which drew a laugh from his new crewmales. “For another-” He stopped short. Ginger was against regulations. He didn’t want to make the commander and gunner aware of his habit.

“Here, drop your gear on this bed by ours,” Hessef said “We’ve been saving it against the day when we’d be whole again.”

Ussmak did as he was asked. The other two males crowded close around him, as if to create the unity that held a good landcruiser crew together. The rest of the males in the barracks looked on from a distance, politely allowing Ussmak to bond with his new comrades before they came forward to introduce themselves.

Quietly, Tvenkel said, “You may not know it, driver, but the Big Uglies have an herb that makes life a lot less boring. Would you care to try a taste, see what I mean?”

Ussmak’s eyes both swung abruptly, bored into the gunner. He lowered his voice, too. “You have-ginger?” He hesitated before he named the precious powder.

Now Tvenkel and Hessef stared at him. “You know about ginger?” the landcruiser commander whispered. His mouth fell open in an enormous grin.

“Yes I know about ginger. I’d love a taste, thanks.” Ussmak wanted to caper like a hatchling. Instead, the three males looked at each other for a long time, none of them saying anything. Ussmak broke the silence: “Superior sirs, I think we’re going to be an outstanding crew.”

Neither commander nor gunner argued with him.

The big Maybach engine coughed, sputtered, died. Colonel Heinrich Jager swore and flipped up the Panther D’s cupola. “More than twice the horsepower of my old Panzer III,” he grumbled, “and it runs less than half as often.” He pulled himself out, dropped down to the ground.

The rest of the crew scrambled out, too. The driver, a big sandy-haired youngster named Rolf Wittman, grinned impudently. “Could be worse, sir,” he said. “At least it hasn’t caught fire the way a lot of them do.”

“Oh, for the blithe spirit of the young,” Jager said, acid in his voice. He wasn’t young himself. He’d fought in the trenches in the First World War, stayed in the Weimar Republic’s Reichswehr after it was over. He’d switched over to panzers as soon as he could after Hitler began rearming Germany, and was commanding a company of Panzer IIIs in the Sixteenth Panzer Division south of Kharkov when the Lizards came.

Now, at last, the Reich had made a machine that might make the Lizards sit up and take notice when they met it. Jager had killed a Lizard tank with his Panzer III, but he was the first to admit he’d been lucky. Anybody who came out alive, let alone victorious, after a run-in with Lizard armor was lucky.

The Panther he now stood beside seemed decades ahead of his old machine. It incorporated all the best features of the Soviet T-34-thick sloped armor, wide tracks, a powerful 75mm gun-into a German design with a smooth suspension, an excellent transmission, and better sights and gun control than Jager had ever imagined before.