Upsetting the Balance

Schultz got out of the way in a hurry. Ludmila released the brake and let theKukuruznik bounce down the rutted dirt of the airstrip. When she’d built up enough speed, she pulled back on the stick and clawed her way into the air. Getting the little biplane off the ground always made her feel that, if you wanted to badly enough, you could run along with your arms spread and take off and fly all by yourself.

The slipstream that came over the windscreen threatened to freeze her cheeks and mouth, the only flesh she bared to it She went into a wide turn and flew over the airstrip on her way south. Georg Schultz was already out of sight.Probably on his way to Tatiana ‘s bed, Ludmila thought scornfully. But he was right: she really had no business complaining. She didn’t want him, and was just as glad to have him out of her hair once and for all.

She buzzed over the defense lines south of Pskov, built with such unflagging and dreadful civilian effort the summer before. Soldiers in the trenches waved at her. And, as happened fairly often, a couple of fools shot at her, not believing anything built by human beings could be in the air. She saw muzzle flashes, heard a couple of bullets crack past.

“Who do you think I am, the devil’s grandmother?” she shouted. That helped relieve her own feelings, but the men on the ground couldn’t hear her. Sometimes, when bullets came closer than they had today, she thought longingly about machine-gunning the trenches of her own side.

Then she was over the Lizards’ lines. She gunned the U-2 for all it was worth, but that, as she knew only too well, was a matter of kopecks, not rubles. A couple of Lizards shot at her, too. They didn’t come any closer than the Russians had. That wasn’t what worried her. They’d use their radios to let their side know she was out and flying, and the Lizards had antiaircraft weapons far more deadly than automatic rifles.

Once she was past the Lizards’ main line, she swung theKukuruznik ’s nose west, then south, then west again, then north for a little ways, and then east for an even shorter time. The less predictable she made her path, the less likely they were to blow her out of the sky.

Some kilometers south of the Lizards’ forward positions, she spotted a convoy of tanks and soft-skinned vehicles slogging along a dirt road. Now that snow had replaced the fall rains, roads were passable again: what had been mud was frozen solid.

That wasn’t what drew her notice to the convoy, though. The tanks and lorries weren’t moving up to help the Lizards advance on Pskov. Instead, they were heading south themselves, away from the city. They had artillery with them, too, some self-propelled and some towed weapons captured from the Red Army and the Germans.

She didn’t get too close to the convoy. A lot of those vehicles mounted machine guns for defense against low-flying aircraft, and her best hope for surviving such a barrage was not drawing it in the first place. As soon as she was sure they really were southbound, she flew away as fast as the U-2 would take her.

“Whatare they doing?” she wondered aloud. Had she not been wearing thick gloves and a leather flying helmet, she would have scratched her head. She’d never seen such a large-scale withdrawal by the Lizards before.

She skimmed along a few meters above the treetops, drawing occasional potshots from the woods below, but was gone before the Lizards could do her any damage. She was thinking hard. The evasive maneuvers she’d performed south of the Lizards’ lines had left her a trifle disoriented, but if she was where she thought she was, she ought to strike another road if she flew southeast for a couple of minutes.

And there it was! Like most roads between Soviet cities, it was dirt-surfaced. But it also had Lizard armor on it, and lorries with the tanks and fighting vehicles. This was a bigger column than the one she’d seen before, and also heading south-southwest, actually, given the direction of the highway, which ran toward Daugavpils in what had been Latvia till the Soviet Union reclaimed it a couple of years before.

“Whatare they doing?” she repeated, but that seemed pretty obvious. They were pulling back from Pskov, or at least pulling back the forces with which they could advance farther rather than merely holding in place.

She found another question: “Why are they doing it?” She didn’t think it was because they’d despaired of conquering Pskov. They had to want the armor somewhere else. Where, she had no idea, and it wasn’t her job to worry about such things anyhow. But she needed to get the information to someone whose jobwas worrying about them.