In the Balance

6

Warsaw knew naked war again, the crack of rifles, the harsh, abrupt roar of howitzers, the screech and whine of incoming shells, the crash when they struck and the slow rumbling crumple of collapsing masonry afterward. Almost, Moishe Russie longed for the days of the sealed-off ghetto, when dying came slow rather than of a sudden. Almost.

Ironic that Jews could come and go in the whole city now, just when the whole city became a battlefield. As the Poles had fought to the last in Warsaw against vastly superior Nazi forces, so now the Germans, embattled in turn, were making Warsaw a fortress against the overwhelming might of the Lizards.

A Lizard plane screamed overhead, almost low enough to touch but too fast for antiaircraft guns to hit. Bombs fell, one after another. The explosions that followed were bigger than those the usual run of Lizard bombs produced unaided (like everyone else in Warsaw-German, Pole, or Jew-Russie had become a connoisseur of explosions); the Lizards must have set off some German ammunition.

“What shall we do, Reb Moishe?” wailed a man in the shelter (actually, it was only a room in the ground floor of a reasonably stout building, but calling it safety might make it so-names, as any kabbalist knew, had power).

“Pray,” Russie answered. He’d begun to grow used to the title with which the Jews of Warsaw insisted on adorning him.

More explosions. Through them, the man cried, “Pray for whom? For the Germans who would kill us in particular or for the Lizards who would kill everyone who stands in their way, which is to say, all of mankind?”

“Such a question, Yitzkhak,” another man chided. “How is the reb to answer a question like that?”

With the Jewish love of disputation even in the face of death, Yitzkhak retorted, “What is a reb for, but to answer questions like that?”

It was indeed the question of the moment. Russie knew that, only too well. Finding an answer that satisfied was hard, hard. Through the different-toned roars and crashes of aircraft, shells, bullets, and bombs, the people huddled against one another and passed the terrifying time by arguing. “Why should we do anything for the ferkakte Nazis? They murder us for no better reason than that we’re Jews.”

“This makes them better than the Lizards, who would murder us for no better reason than that we’re people? Remember Berlin. In an instant, as much suffering as the Germans took three years to give us.”

“They deserve it. God made the Germans as a scourge for us, and God made the Lizards as a scourge for the Germans.” A near miss from a bomb sent chunks of plaster raining down from the ceiling onto the heads and shoulders of the people in the shelter. If the Lizards were God’s scourge on the Germans, they also chastised the Jews, Russie thought. But then, scourges were not brooms, and did not sweep clean.

Someone twisted the argument in a new direction: “God made the Lizards? I can’t believe that.”

“If God didn’t, Who did?” someone else countered.

Russie knew the answer the Poles outside the ghetto’s shattered walls gave to that. But no matter what the goyim thought, Jews put no great stock in the Devil. God was God; how could He have a rival?

But fitting the Lizards into God’s scheme of things wasn’t easy, either, even as scourges. The Germans bad plastered Warsaw with posters of a Wehrmacht soldier superimposed over a photograph of naked burnt corpses in the ruins of Berlin. In German, Polish, and even Yiddish, the legend below read, HE STANDS BETWEEN YOU-AND THIS.

It was a good, effective poster. Russie would have reckoned it more effective still had.he not seen so many naked Jewish corpses in Warsaw, corpses dead on account of the Germans. Still, he said, “I will pray for the Germans, as I would pray for any men who sin greatly.”

Hisses and jeers met his words. Someone-he thought it was Yitzkhak-shouted, “I’ll pray for the Germans, too-to catch the cholera.” Cries of agreement rang loud and often profane-no way to speak of prayer, Russie thought disapprovingly.

“Let me finish,” he said, and won a measure, if not of quiet, then of lowered voices: the advantage of being thought a reb, someone whose words were reckoned worth hearing. He went on, “I will pray for the Germans, but I shall not aid them. They want to wipe us from the face of the earth. However badly these Lizards treat all mankind, they will treat us no worse than any other part of it. Thus I see in them God’s judgment, which may be harsh but is never unjust.”

The Jews in the shelter listened to Russie, but not all followed his way of thinking. Punctuated by blasts outside, the dispute went on. Someone tapped Russie on the arm: a clean-shaven young man (Russie was almost sure the fellow had fewer years than his own twenty-six, though his beardless cheeks also accented his youth) in a cloth cap and shabby tweed jacket. He said, “Will you do more than simply stand aside while Lizards and Germans fight, Reb Moishe?” From under the stained brim of the cap, his eyes bored into Russie while he awaited his reply.

“What more can I do?” Russie asked cautiously. He wanted to shift his feet. He’d not been under such intense scrutiny since his last oral examination before the war, and maybe not then; this young, secular-looking Jew had eyes sharp and piercing as slivers of glass. “And who are you?”

“I’m Mordechai Anielewicz,” the smooth-faced young man answered, his offhand tone making his name seem small and unimportant. “As for what you can do…” He put his head close to Moishe’s-not, Russie thought, that there was much danger of anyone overhearing them in the noisy chaos of the makeshift shelter. “As for what you can do-you can help us when we hit the Germans.”

“When you what?” Russie stared at him.

“When we hit the Germans,” Anielewicz repeated. “We have grenades, pistols, a few rifles, even one machine gun. The Armja Krajowa”-the Home Army, the Polish resistance forces-“has many more. If we rise, the Nazis won’t be able to fight us and the Lizards both, and Warsaw will fall. And we will have our vengeance.” His whole face, thin and pale like everyone else’s, blazed with anticipation.

“I–I don’t know,” Russie stammered. “What makes you think the Lizards will make better masters than the Germans?”

“How could they be worse?” Every line of Anielewicz’s body was a shout of contempt.

“This I do not know, but after we have seen so much suffering, who knows what may be possible?” Russie said. “And the Poles-will they really rise with you, or sit on their hands and let the Nazis slaughter you? For every Armja Krajowa man, there’s another in the dark blue police.” The German-led Order Police wore uniforms of a shade nearly navy. Russie added, “Sometimes the Armja Krajowa man is in the dark blue police. There are traitors everywhere.”

Anielewicz shrugged, as if hearing nothing he didn’t already know. “Most of them hate Germans worse than Jews. As for those who don’t, well, we’ll have more guns after the rising than we do now. If we fight Germans, we can fight Poles, too. Come on, Reb Moishe-you’ve said all along the Lizards were God’s means of delivering us from the Nazis. Say it again when we rise, to hearten us and bring new fighters to our cause.”

“But the Lizards are not even human beings,” Russie said.

Anielewicz impaled him on another stare. “Are the Nazis?”

“Yes,” he answered at once. “Evil human beings, but human beings all the same. I don’t know what to tell you. I-” Russie stopped, shaking his head in bewilderment. Ever since God granted him a sign-ever since the Lizards came to Earth-he’d been treated as someone important, as someone whose opinion mattered. Reb Moishe: even Anielewicz called him that. Now, he discovered that with importance came responsibility; hundreds, more like thousands, of lives would turn on what he decided. All at once, he wished he were simply a starving onetime medical student once more.

But that was not the sort of wish God was in the habit of granting. Russie temporized: “By when must I decide?”

“We strike tomorrow night,” Anielewicz answered. Then, with a couple of quick wriggles, he slid away from Russie and lost himself in the packed shelter.

After a while, Lizard bombs stopped raining down. No sirens wailed to announce the all clear, but that proved nothing. Power was erratic in Warsaw these days. For that matter, power had always been erratic in the ghetto. People took advantage of the lull to make their escape, to try to rejoin their loved ones.

As he made his way to the door with the rest, Russie looked for Mordechai Anielewicz. He did not find him; one shabby Jew looked all too much like another, especially from behind. Russie came out onto Gliniana Street, a couple of blocks east of the overflowingly full Jewish cemetery.

He glanced toward the graveyard. The Germans had positioned a couple of 8.8-centimeter antiaircraft guns in it; their long barrels stuck up from among the tumbled headstones like monster elephant trunks. Russie could see the gun crews moving around now that the bombardment had eased up.

The sun sparked dully off the matte finish of their helmets. Nazis, Russie thought, the source of endless misery and death and ruin. A plume of cigarette smoke floated up from one of them. They were Nazis, but they were also human beings. Would life be better under things called Lizards?

“Send me a sign, God,” he begged silently, as he had on the night when the Lizards came. One of the gunners assumed a spraddle-legged stance Russie recognized: the fellow was urinating. Hoarse German laugher floated to Russie’s ears. It filled him with rage-how like the Nazis to piss on dead Jews and then laugh about it.

All at once, he realized he had his sign.

An intelligence officer set a new stack of documents in front of Atvar. As was his habit, he skimmed through the summaries till he found one that engaged his full attention. It didn’t take long this time. He read every word of the second report in the stack, then turned one eye toward the intelligence male. “This report is confirmed as accurate?”

“Which one do you have there, Exalted Fleetlord?” The officer peered down to see where Atvar had paused. “Oh, that one. Yes, Exalted Fleetlord, no possible mistake there. The Big Uglies in the town in the empire of Deutschland are fighting amongst themselves-quite ferociously, too.”

“And the radio intercepts? Those are reliable as well?”

The intelligence male nervously twitched his tailstump. “There we are less certain, Exalted Fleetlord. One of the languages seems close to Deutsch, the other rather further from Russki-these cursed Tosevites have altogether too many languages. But if we correctly understand the import of these signals, one faction in the city appears to be seeking our aid against the other.”

“It’s not the Deutsche themselves calling for our assistance, surely?”

“By the Emperor, no, Exalted Fleetlord,” the intelligence officer said. “It’s the others, the ones fighting against them. Our estimates are that the empire of Deutschland as it now stands is a jerry-built structure, most of its territory having been added in the course of the inter-Tosevite war in progress when our fleet arrived. Some of the inhabitants of that empire remain restive under Deutsch control.”

“I see,” Atvar said, though he didn’t, not altogether. Product of an empire-of the Empire-which had been itself for tens of millennia, he felt himself failing to grasp what it was like to try to build one in a couple of years (without even the symbol of an emperor to bind it together, in most cases), or, for that matter, to pass suddenly out of the control of one empire and into that of another.

The intelligence officer said, “The groups involved in the fighting against the Deutsche appear to be prominently represented in the camp our forces overran east of the town now involved in strife.”

“Which camp do you mean?” Atvar asked; a fleetlord’s life is full of minutiae. Then he let out a hiss. “Yes, I remember. That camp. What was its name?”

The intelligence officer had to check the computer before he answered. “It is called Treblinka, Exalted Fleetlord.” Even spoken by a male of the Race, the Tosevite word sounded harsh and ugly. “Do you wish me to call up the images our combat teams recorded when they captured the place?”

“By the Emperor, no,” Atvar said quickly. “Once was sufficient.”

Once, as a matter of fact, had been excessive. Atvar thought he’d hardened himself to the horrors of war. Even such hardening as he’d gained had not come easy; his own forces were taking far more casualties than the grimmest estimates had predicted before the fleet left Home. But then, no one had expected the Tosevites to be able to fight an industrialized war.

What the Race’s advancing armor discovered at Treblinka wasn’t industrialized war, though. It wasn’t even industrialized exploitation of criminals and captives. The Race had camps of that sort on all its planets, and had overrun more on Tosev 3; the SSSR, especially, seemed full of them, all far more brutal than anything the Emperor, in his mercy, would have permitted.

But Treblinka… the fleetlord did not need the computer screen to replay images of Treblinka. Once reminded of the place, his mind called up the pictures, and he could not turn his eyes away from what his mind saw. Treblinka wasn’t industrialized war or industrialized exploitation. Treblinka was industrialized murder-mass graves full of Tosevites shot in the head, trucks designed so the waste products of their inefficient, dirty engines were vented into a sealed compartment to kill those inside, and, just installed before the Race seized Treblinka, chambers to slaughter large numbers of Big Uglies at once with poisonous gas. It was as if the Deutsche had kept working to find the most effective way to get rid of as many other Big Uglies at a batch as they could.

Even if Treblinka represented no more than one set of barbarians tormenting another, it was plenty to sicken Atvar. It also set him thinking. “You say the groups now opposing the Deutsche in this town are the same ones the Deutsche have been massacring?”

“Linguistic evidence and preliminary interrogations suggest this is so, yes, Exalted Fleetlord,” the intelligence officer answered.

“We shall promise, them help, then, and deliver it,” Atvar said.

“As the exalted fleetlord wishes.” The intelligence officer deserved higher rank, Atvar thought. He kept any trace of what he thought about the fleetlord’s order from his voice. Whether he agreed with it or thought it demented, he would obey it, as males of the Race were trained to obey from their hatchling days.

Atvar said, “We have here at last an opportunity to use some Big Uglies as gloves, with our hands inside. Despite their losses, the leading empires refuse to yield to us. Italia is wavering, but-”

“But Italia has too many Deutsch soldiers in it to be fully a free agent. Yes,” the male said.

He was not only submissive but keen, Atvar thought happily, forgiving him the interruption because he had been right. “Exactly so. Perhaps we shall presently help them as we shall go to the aid of the, the-”

“The Polska and the Yehudim,” the male supplied.

“Thank you, those are the kinds of Big Uglies I had in mind, yes,” Atvar said. “And our assistance to them should not be grudging, either. If they give us a secure zone from which we may with impunity assail both Deutschland and the SSSR, we shall derive great benefits therefrom. We can promise them whatever they want. Once Tosev 3 is fully under our control… well, it’s not as if they belong to the Race.”

“Or even the Rabotevs or Hallessi,” the intelligence officer said.

“Quite so. They remain wild, and thus we have no obligations toward them save those which we choose to assume.” Atvar studied the male. “You are perceptive. Remind me of your name, that I may record your diligence.”

“I am Drefsab, Exalted Fleetlord,” the officer said. “Drefsab. I shall not forget.”

Georg Schultz raised up on his elbows to peer at the ripening fields of wheat and oats and barley, made a sour face. “The crop at this kolkhoz is going to be shitty this year,” he said with the certainty of a man who had grown up on a farm.

“That, at the moment, is the least of our worries,” Heinrich Jager answered. He hefted the Schmeisser that had belonged to Dieter Schmidt. Schmidt himself had lain under the black soil of the Ukraine for the past two days. Jager hoped he and Schultz had heaped on enough to keep the wild dogs from tearing up the body, but he wasn’t sure. He and his gunner had been in a hurry.

Schultz’s chuckle had a bitter edge to it. “Ja, we’re a pair out of a jumble sale, aren’t we?”

“You can say that again,” Jager answered. Both men wore scavenged infantry helmets and infantry tunics of field gray rather than tanker’s black; Schultz, carried an infantry rifle as well. Jager’s new, bristly beard itched all the time. Schultz complained about his, too. It was coming in carroty red, though his hair was light brown. Any inspector who saw them would have locked them in the guardhouse and thrown away the key.

Tankmen are usually neat to the point of fussiness. A tank without things stowed just so, and with working parts dirty and poorly maintained, is a tank waiting for breakdown or blowup. But Jager had jettisoned spit and polish when he bailed out of his killed Panzer III. His Schmeisser was clean. So was his pistol. Past that, he’d stopped worrying. He was alive, and for a German on the south Russian steppe, that remained no small achievement.

As if to remind him he was still alive, his stomach growled. The last time he’d been full was the night he got a bellyful of kasha, the night before the Lizards came. He knew what he had in the way of rations: nothing. He knew what Schultz had: the same.

“We have to get something from that collective farm,” he said. “Take it by force, sneak, up in the night, or go up and beg-I don’t much care which any more. But we have to eat.”

“I’m damned if I want to be a chicken thief,” Schultz said. Then, more pragmatically, he added, “Shouldn’t be too hard, just going on in. Most of the men, they’ll be off at the front.”

“That’s true,” Jager said; almost all the figures he saw working in the field wore babushkas. “But this is Russia, remember. Even the women carry rifles. I’d sooner get something peaceably than by robbery. With the Lizards all around, we may need help from the Ivans.”

“You’re the officer,” Schultz said, shrugging.

Jager knew what he meant: you’re the one who gets paid to think. Trouble was, he didn’t know what to think. The Lizards were at war with Russia no less than with the Reich, which meant he and these kolkhozniks shared a common foe. On the other hand, he hadn’t heard anything to let him know Germany and the Soviet Union weren’t still fighting each other (for that matter, he hadn’t heard anything at all since his panzer died).

He got to his feet. The south Russian steppe had seemed overpoweringly vast when he traversed it in a tank. Now that he was on foot, he felt he could tramp the gently rolling country forever without coming to its end.

Georg Schultz stood up beside him, though the gunner muttered, “Might as well be a bug walking across a plate.” That was the other side of Russia’s immensity: if one could see a long way, one could be seen just as far.

The peasants spotted the two Germans almost instantly; Jager saw their movements turn jerky even before they swung his way. He kept his submachine gun lowered as he strode toward the cluster of thatch-roofed wooden buildings that formed the heart of the kolkhoz. “Let’s keep this peaceful, if we can.”

“Yes, sir,” Schultz said. “If we can’t, no matter what we take from the Ivans now, they’re liable to stalk us through the grass and kill us.”

“Just what I’m thinking,” Jager agreed.

The workers in the fields converged on the Germans. None of them put down their hoes and spades and other tools. Several, young women and old men, carried firearms-pistols stuck in belts, a couple of rifles slung over shoulders. Some of the men would have seen action in the previous war. Jager thought he and Schultz could have taken the lot of them even so, but he didn’t want to find out the hard way.

He turned to the gunner. “Do you speak any Russian?”

“Ruki verkh! — hands up! That’s about it. How about you, sir?”

“A little more. Not much.”

A short, swag-bellied fellow marched importantly up to Jager. It really was a march, with head thrown back, arms pumping, legs snapping forward one after the other. The kolkhoz chairman, Jager realized. He rattled off a couple of sentences that might have been in Tibetan for all the good they did the major.

Jager did know one word that might come in handy here. He used it: “Khleb-bread.” He rubbed his belly with the hand that, wasn’t holding the Schmeisser.

All the kolkhozniks started talking at once. The word “Fritz” came up in the gabble, again and again; it was almost the only word Jager understood. It made him smile-the exact Russian equivalent of the German slang “Ivan.”

“Khleb, da,” the chairman said, a broad grin of relief on his wide, sweaty face. He spoke another word of Russian, one Jager didn’t know. The German shrugged, kept his features blank. The chairman tried again, this time in halting German: “Milk?”

“Spasebo,” Jager said. “Thank you. Da.”

“Milk?” Schultz made a face. “Me, I’d rather drink vodka-there, that’s another Russian word I know.”

“Vodka?” The kolkhoz chief grinned and pointed back toward one of the buildings behind him. He said something too rapid and complicated for Jager to follow, but his gestures left no doubt that if the Germans wanted vodka, the collective farm could supply it.

Jager shook his head. “Nyet, nyet,” he said. “Milk.” To his gunner, he added, “I don’t want us getting drunk here, not even a little bit. They’re liable to wait until we go to sleep and then cut our throats.”

“Likely you’re right, sir,” Schultz said. “But still-milk? I’ll feel like I’m six years old again.”

“Stick to water, then. We’ve been drinking it for a while now, and we haven’t come down with a flux yet.” Jager was thankful for that. He’d been cut off from the medical service ever since the battle-skirmish, he supposed, was really a better word for it-that cost his company its last panzers. If he and Schultz hadn’t stayed healthy, their only chance was to lie down and hope they got better.

Another old woman-a babushka in the grandmotherly sense of the word-hobbled toward the Germans. In her apron she carried several rings of dark, chewy-looking bread. Jager stomach growled the second he saw it.

He took two rings. Schultz took three. It was food fit for peasants, he knew; back in Munster, before the war, he would have turned up his nose at black bread. But compared to some of the things he’d eaten in Russia-and especially compared to nothing at all, of which he’d had far too much lately-it was manna from heaven.

Georg Schultz somehow managed to cram a whole ring of bread into his mouth at once. His cheeks bulged until he looked like a snake trying to swallow a fat toad. The kolkhozniks giggled and nudged one another. The gunner, his face beatific, ignored them. His jaws worked and worked. Every so often, he swallowed. His enormous cud of bread began to shrink.

“That’s not the best way to do it, Sergeant,” Jager said. “See, I’ve almost managed to finish both of mine while you were eating that one.”

“I was too hungry to wait,” Schultz answered blurrily-his mouth was still pretty full.

The babushka went away, came back with a couple of carved wooden mugs of milk. It was so fresh, it warmed Jager’s cup. Its creamy richness went well with the earthy, mouth-fifing taste of the bread. Peasants’ food, yes, but a peasant who ate it every day was likely to be a contented man.

For politeness’ sake, Jager declined more, though he could have eaten another two dozen rings-or so he thought-without filling himself up. He drained the mug of milk, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, asked the kolkhoz chief the most important question he could think of: “Eidechsen?” He necessarily used the German word for Lizards; he did not know how to say it in Russian. He waved his hand along the horizon to show he wanted to find out where the aliens were.

The kolkhozniks didn’t get it. Jager pantomimed short creatures, imitated the unmistakable screech of their airplanes as best he could. The kolkhoz chief’s eyes lit up. “Ah-yasheritsi,” he said. The peasants clustered round him exclaimed. Jager memorized the word; he had the feeling he would need it again.

The chief pointed south. Jager knew there were Lizards in that direction; that was the way he’d come. Then the chief pointed east, but made pushing motions with his hands, as if to say the Lizards over there weren’t close. Jager nodded to show he understood. And then the kolkhoz chief pointed west. He didn’t do any dumb show to indicate the Lizards thereabouts were far away, either.

Jager looked at Georg Schultz. Schultz was looking at him, too. He suspected he looked as unhappy as the gunner did. If there were Lizards between them and the bulk of the Wehrmacht… Jager didn’t care to follow that thought to its logical conclusion. For that matter, if there were Lizards over that way, the Wehrmacht might not have much left in the way of bulk.

The kolkhoz chief gave him another piece of bad news: “Berlin kaput, Germanski. Yasheritsi.” He used those expressive hands of his to show the city going up in a single huge explosion.

Schultz grunted as if he’d been kicked in the belly. Jager felt hollow and empty inside, himself. He couldn’t imagine Berlin gone, or Germany with Berlin gone. He tried not to believe it. “Maybe they’re lying,” Schultz said hoarsely. “Maybe it’s just the God-damned Russian radio.”

“Maybe.” But the more Jager studied the kolkhozniks, the less he believed that. If they’d gloated at his reaction to the news, he would have doubted them more, have thought they were trying to fool him. But while a few looked pleased at his discomfiture (as was only natural, when his country and theirs had spent a year locked in a huge, vicious embrace), most looked at him and his companion with sympathetic eyes and somber faces. That convinced him he needed to worry.

He found a useful Russian word: “Nichevo.” He knew he pronounced it badly; German had to use the clumsy letter-group tsch even to approximate the sound that lay at its heart.

But the kolkhozniks understood. “Tovarisch, nichevo,” one of them said: Comrade, it can’t be helped, there’s nothing to be done about it. It was a very Russian word indeed: the Russians were-and needed to be-long on resignation.

He hadn’t quite meant it that way. He explained what he had meant: “Berlin da, yasheritsi-” He ground the heel of his boot into the dirt. “Berlin nyet, yasheritsi-” He ground his heel into the dirt again.

Some of the Russians clapped their hands, admiring his determination. Some looked at him as if he was crazy. Maybe I am, Jager thought. He hadn’t imagined anyone could hurt Germany as the Lizards had hurt it. Poland, France, and the Low Countries had gone down like ninepins. England fought on, but was walled away from Europe. And though the Soviet Union remained on its feet, Jager was sure the Germans would have finished it by the end of 1942. The fighting south of Kharkov showed the Ivans hadn’t learned much, no matter how many of them there were.

But the Lizards-the Lizards were an imponderable. They weren’t the soldiers they might have been, but their gear was so good it didn’t always matter. He’d found that out for himself, the hard way.

A faint buzz in the sky, far off to northward. Jager’s head whipped around. Any sky noise was alarming these days, doubly so when it might come from an almost invulnerable Lizard aircraft. This, though, was no Lizard plane. “Just one of the Ivans’ flying sewing machines, Major-not worth jumping out of your skin for.”

“Anything that’s up there without a swastika on it makes me nervous.”

“Can’t blame you for that, I guess. But if we aren’t safe from the Red Air Force here in the middle of a kolkhoz, we aren’t safe anywhere.” The tank gunner ran a hand along his gingery whiskers. “Of course, these days we really aren’t safe anywhere.”

The Soviet biplane didn’t go into a strafing run, although Jager saw it carried machine guns. It skimmed over the collective farm, a couple of hundred meters off the ground. Its little engine did indeed make a noise like a sewing machine running flat out.

The plane banked, turned in what looked like an impossibly tight circle, came back over the knot of people gathered around the two Germans. This time it flew lower. Several kolkhozniks waved up at the pilot, who was clearly visible in the open cockpit, goggles, leather flying helmet, and all.

The biplane banked once more, now north of the collective farm again. When it turned once more, it was plainly on a landing run. Dust spurted up as its wheels touched the ground. It bounced along, slowed to a stop.

“Don’t know as how I like this, sir,” Schultz said. “Dealing with the Russians here is one thing, but that plane, that’s part of the Red Air Force. We shouldn’t have anything to do with something connected to the Bolshevik government like that.”

“I know we shouldn’t, Sergeant, but everything’s gone to hell since the Lizards got here,” Jager answered. “Besides, what choice have we?” Too many kolkhozniks carried guns to let him think about hijacking the toy plane with the red star on its flank, even assuming he knew how to fly it-which he didn’t.

The pilot was climbing out of the plane, putting his booted foot in the stirrup on the side of the dusty fuselage below his seat. His boot, his seat? No, Jager saw: a blond braid stuck out under the back of the flying helmet, and the cheeks under those goggles (now shoved up onto the top of the flying helmet) had never known-or needed-a razor. Even baggy flying clothes could not long conceal a distinctly unmasculine shape.

Schultz saw the same thing at the same time. His long jaw worked as if he were about to spit, but he had sense enough to remember where he was and think better of it. Disgust showed in his voice instead: “One of their damned girl fliers, sir”

“So she is.” The pilot was coming their way. Jager made the best of a situation worse than he really cared for: “Rather a pretty one, too.”

Ludmila Gorbunova skimmed over the steppe, looking for Lizards or anything else interesting. No matter what she found, she wouldn’t be able to report back to her base unless the emergency was great enough to make passing along her knowledge more important than coming home. Planes that used radios in flight all too often stopped flying immediately thereafter.

She was far enough south to start getting alert-and worried-when she spotted a crowd around a collective farm’s core buildings at a time when most of the kolkhozniks should have been in the fields. That in itself wasn’t so unusual, but then she caught a glint of light reflecting up from a couple of helmets. As the angle at which she viewed them shifted, she saw they were blackish gray, not the dun color she had expected.

Germans. Her lip twisted. What the Soviet government had to say about Germans had flip-flopped several times over the past few years. They’d gone from being bloodthirsty fascist beasts to peace-loving partners in the struggle against imperialism and then, on June 22, 1941, back to being beasts again, this time with a vengeance.

Ludmila heard the endless droning propaganda, noted when it changed, and changed her thinking accordingly. People who couldn’t do that had a way of disappearing. Of course, for the past year the Germans themselves had been worse than any propaganda about them.

She wished that meant no one in the Soviet Union had anything good to think about the Nazis. The measure of Hitler’s damnation was that imperialist England and the United States joined the Soviets in the struggle against him. The measure of the Soviet Union’s damnation (though Ludmila did not think of it in those terms) was that so many Soviet citizens-Ukrainians, Baltic peoples, Byelornssian, Tatars, Cossacks, even Great Russians-collaborated with Hitler against Moscow.

Were these kolkhozniks collaborators, then? If they were, a quick pass with her machine guns would rid the world of a fair number of them. But the line from Radio Moscow on Germany had changed yet again since the Lizards came. They were not forgiven their crimes (no one who had fled from them would ever forgive their crimes), but they were at least human. If they cooperated with Soviet forces against the invaders from beyond the moon, they were not to be harmed.

So Ludmila’s forefinger came off the firing button. She swung the Kukuruznik back toward the collective farm for a closer look. Sure enough, those were Germans down there. she decided to land and try to find out what they were up to.

Only when the U-2 was bumping along the ground to a stop did it occur to her that, if the kolkhozniks were collaborators, they would not want a report going back toward Moscow for eventual vengeance. She almost took off again, but chose to stay and see what she could.

The farmers and the Germans came toward her peacefully enough. She saw several weapons in the little crowd, but none pointed at her. The Germans kept their rifle and submachine guns slung.

“Who is the chief here?” she asked.

“I am, Comrade Pilot,” said a fat little fellow who stood with his back very straight, as if to emphasize how important he was. “Kliment Yegorevich Pavlyuchenko, at your service.”

She gave her own name and patronymic, watching this Pavlyuchenko with a wary eye. He’d spoken her fair and called her “comrade,” but that did not mean he was to be trusted, not with two Germans at his elbow. She pointed at them. “How did they come to your collective farm, comrade? Do they speak any Russian?”

“The older one does, a word here and there, anyhow. The one with the red whiskers knows only how to eat. They must have been straggling a good while-they hadn’t even heard about Berlin.”

Both Germans looked at Pavlyuchenko when they heard the name of their capital. Ludmila studied them as if they really were a couple of dangerous beasts; she’d never before been close enough to see Hitlerites as individuals.

Rather to her surprise, they looked like neither the inhumanseeming killing machines that had swept the Soviet armies east across a thousand kilometers of Russia and the Ukraine nor like Winter Fritz of recent propaganda, with a woman’s shawl round his shoulders and an icicle dangling from his nose. They were just men, a little taller, a little skinnier, a little longer-faced than Russian norms, but just men all the same. She wrinkled her nose. They smelled like men, too, men who hadn’t bathed any time lately.

The younger one, the bigger one, had a peasant look to him despite his foreign cast of feature. She could easily imagine him on a stool milking a cow or, on his knees plucking weeds from a vegetable plot. The unabashed way he leered at her was peasantlike, too.

The other German was harder to fathom. He looked tired and clever at the same time, with pinched features that did not match the lined and sun-darkened skin of an outdoorsman. Like the red-whiskered one, he wore a helmet and an infantryman’s blouse over the black trousers of panzer troops. The blouse had a private’s plain shoulder straps, but she did not think it was part of the gear he’d started out with. He was too old and too sharp to make a proper private.

In secondary school, a million years before, she’d had a little German. This past year, she’d done her best to forget it, and hoped her transcript had perished when Kiev was lost: knowing the enemy’s language could easily make one an object of suspicion. If these soldiers had little or no Russian, though, it would prove useful. she dredged a phrase out of her memory: “Wie heissen Sie?”

The Germans’ worn, filthy faces lit up. Till now, they’d been nearly mute, tongue-tied among the Russians (which was also the root meaning of Nemtsi, the old Russian word for Germans-those who could make no intelligible sounds). The ginger-whiskered one grinned and said, “Ich heisse Feldwebel Georg Schultz, Fraulein,” and rattled off his pay number too fast for her to follow.

The older one said, “Ich heisse Heinrich Jager Major” and also gave his number. She ignored it; it wasn’t something she needed to know right now. The kolkhozniks murmured among themselves, either impressed she could speak to the Wehrmacht men in their own tongue or mistrustful of her for the same reason.

She wished she recalled more. She had to ask their unit, by clumsy circumlocution: “From which group of men do you come?”

The sergeant started to answer; the major (his name meant “hunter,” Ludmila thought; he certainly had a hunter’s eyes) cleared his throat, which sufficed to make the younger man shut up. Jager said, “Are we prisoners of war, Russian pilot? You may ask only certain things of prisoners of war.” He spoke slowly, clearly, and simply; perhaps he recognized Ludmila’s hesitancy with his language.

“Nyet,” she answered, and then, “Nein,” in case he hadn’t understood the Russian. He was nodding as she spoke, so evidently he had. She went on, “You are not prisoners of war. We fight the”-she perforce had to say yasheritsi, not knowing the German word for “Lizards”-“first. We fight Germans now only if Germans fight us. Not forget war against Germany, but put it to one side for now.”

“Ah,” the major said. “Yes, that is good. We fight the Lizards first also.” (Eidechsen was what the German said. Ludmila made a mental note of it.) Jager went on, “Since we have this common foe, I will tell you that we are from Sixteenth Panzer. I will also tell you that Schultz and I have together killed a Lizard panzer.”

She stared at him. “This is true?” Radio Moscow made all sorts of claims of Lizard armor destroyed, but she had flown over too many battlefields to take them seriously any more. she’d seen what was left of German panzer units that tried to take on the Lizards, too: not much. Were these tankmen lying to impress her with how masterful the Germans remained?

No, she decided after a moment of watching and listening to them. They described the action in too much vivid detail for her to doubt them: if they hadn’t been through what they were talking about, they belonged on the stage, not in the middle of a collective farm. Most convincing of all was Jager’s mournful summary at the end: “We hurt them, but they wrecked us. All my company’s tanks are gone.”

“What are they saying, Comrade Pilot?” Pavlyuchenko demanded.

She quickly translated. The kolkhozniks gaped at the Germans as if they were indeed the superior beings they claimed to be. Their wide eyes made Ludmila want to kick them. Russians always looked on Germans with a peculiar mixture of envy and fear. Ever since the days of the Vikings, the Russian people had learned from more sophisticated Germanic folk to the west. And ever since the days of the Vikings, the Germanic peoples had looked to seize what they could from their Slavic neighbors. Teutonic Knights, Swedes, Prussians, Germans-the labels changed, but the Germanic push to the east seemed to go on forever. Though latest and worst, Hitler was but one of many.

Still, these particular Germans could be useful. They hadn’t beaten the Lizards, far from it, but they’d evidently made them sit up and take notice. Soviet authorities needed to learn what they knew. Ludmila returned to their language: “I will take you with me when I fly back to my base, and send you on from there. I promise nothing bad will happen to you.”

“What, if we don’t care to go?” asked the major-Jager she reminded herself.

she did her best to put authority in her gaze. “If you do not go, you will at best wander on foot and alone. Maybe you will find Lizards. Maybe you will find Russians who think you are worse than Lizards. Maybe these kolkhozniks are only waiting for you to fall asleep…”

The panzer major was a cool customer. He did not turn to give Kliment Pavlyuchenko a once-over, which meant he’d already formed his judgment of the chief. He did say, “Why should I trust your promises? I’ve seen the bodies of Germans you Russians caught. They ended up with their noses and ears cut off, or worse. How do I know Sergeant Schultz and I won’t wind up the same way?”

The injustice of that almost choked Ludmila. “If you Nazi swine hadn’t invaded our country, we never would have harmed a one of you. I’ve seen with my own eyes what you do to the part of the Soviet Union you took. You should have everything you get.”

She glared at Jager. He glared back. Then Georg Schultz surprised her-and, by his expression, the major as well-by saying, “Krieg ist Scheisse-war is shit.” He surprised her again when he came up with two Russian words, “Voina-gavno,” which meant the same thing.

“Da!” the kolkhozniks roared as one. They crowded round the sergeant slapping his back pressing cigarettes and coarse ma khorka tobacco into his hands and tunic pockets. All at once he was not an enemy to them, but a human being.

Turning back to Jager Ludmila pointed at the kolkhozniks and the gunner. “This is why we have stopped fighting Germans who do not fight us, and why I can say no harm will come to you. Germany and Soviet Union are enemies, da. People and Lizards are worse enemies.”

“You speak well, and as you say, we have little choice.” Jager pointed to her faithful Kukuruznik. “Will that ugly little thing carry three?”

“Not with comfort, but yes,” she answered, stifling her anger at the adjective he’d chosen.

One corner of his mouth tugged upward in an expression she had trouble interpreting: a smile, she supposed, but not like any she’d seen on a Russian face, more like a dry white wine than a simple vodka. He said, “How do you know that, once we get into the air, we will not make you fly us toward German lines?”

“I do not have the petrol to reach the nearest I know of,” she said. “Also, the most you can make me do is fly into the ground and kill us. I will not fly west.”

He studied her for perhaps half a minute, that curious, ironic smile still on his face. Slowly, he nodded. “You are a soldier.”

“Yes,” she said, and found she had to return the compliment. “And you. So you must understand why we need to learn how you killed a Lizard panzer.”

“Wasn’t hard,” Schultz put in. “They have wonderful panzers to ride around in, ja, but they’re even worse tankmen than you Ivans.”

Had he said that in Russian, he would have forfeited the goodwill he’d won from the kolkhoz’s farmers. As it was, Ludmila gave him a dirty look. So did Kliment Pavlyuchenko, who seemed to have a smattering of German.

“He is right,” Jager said, which distressed Ludmila more, for she was convinced the major’s judgment needed to be taken seriously. “You cannot deny our panzer troops have more skills than yours, Pilot”-he gave the word a feminine ending-“or we could never have advanced in our Panzer IIIs against your KVs and T-34s. The Lizards have even less skill than you Russians, but their tanks are so good, they do not need much. If we had comparable equipment, we would slaughter them.”

So here is German arrogance at first hand Ludmila thought. Having admitted the Lizards had smashed his unit to bits, all the panzer major cared to talk about was the foe’s shortcomings. Ludmila said, “Since our equipment is unfortunately not a match for theirs, how do we go about fighting them?”

“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.

Krentel, meanwhile, had been on the command circuit with base. “The range of the launcher is 2,200, bearing 42,” he reported. “Gunner, send the Big Uglies back there two rounds of high explosive. That will make them think twice about harassing the Race again.”

“Two rounds of high explosive. It shall be done,” Telerep said tonelessly. The turret spun in its ring until it faced more nearly south than west. The big gun barked twice. Two or three of the other landcruisers in the squadron also fired, though none more than once.

Ussmak thought all those commanders fools, and Krentel a double fool. He doubted the Big Uglies who had fired the salvo were anywhere near their launcher any more; if they had any sense, they’d have touched it off with a long electric wire. That’s what he would have done in their place, certainly. And they made better guerrilas than stand-up soldiers.

Krentel told him, “Shift to bearing 42, driver. I want to finish off that clutch of bandits. They shall not flourish within the bounds of territory controlled by the Race.”

“Bearing 42. It shall be done,” Ussmak said. He swung the landcruiser almost in a half circle, drove back in a direction close to the one from which the squadron had advanced. This time, he admitted to himself, Krentel had a point.

“Watch the ground carefully,” the commander added. “We must not risk driving over a mine. Our landcruiser, like every other, is precious to the Race and its expansion. Exert unusual caution.”

“It shall be done,” Ussmak repeated. He wished Krentel would stop jumping around like a female waiting for her first pair of eggs. How was he supposed to get a good look at the ground while driving buttoned up? He didn’t want to open his hatch, not yet. The Big Uglies had a habit of lobbing a second rocket salvo just about when males were taking a deep breath after the first one.

Even if his head was out in the open, he didn’t think he’d spot a buried mine. The Tosevites were extraordinarily good at concealing them under leaves or stones or chunks of the rubble that littered the area from previous battles. He took comfort in remembering the Tosevite mines were designed to disable the weak and clumsy landcruisers the Big Uglies built. Even if one exploded right under his own machine, it might not wreck it. Looking at it with the other eye turret, though, it might.

Sure enough, more rockets rained down on the squadron. Krentel must have reopened the hatch at the top of his cupola, for Ussmak heard him slam it again in a hurry. The driver opened his jaws in amusement. No, the new commander wasn’t as smart as he thought he was. With luck, he’d learn.

A clump of low Tosevite trees, their colors duller than the ones of Home, stood by the landcruisers’ path about halfway to the place from which the natives had touched off their rockets. Ussmak thought about warning Telerep to fix his machine gun on those trees, but decided not to. Telerep knew his business perfectly well. And besides-

“Watch those trees, gunner.” Before Ussmak could finish thinking Krentel would give the unnecessary order, Krentel gave it.

“It shall be done, commander.” Again Telerep’s subordination was perfect.

Ussmak watched the trees, too. Just because the order was unnecessary didn’t make it stupid. If he were a Big Ugly bandit, he’d post males in those trees to see what he could do about the Race’s landcruisers. In fact…

If Krentel had been reading his mind before, now Telerep was. The gunner fired a burst into the little stretch of wood. With luck, he’d kill a Big Ugly or two and flush out some more. Ussmak wouldn’t have wanted to crouch in hiding while bullets snarled through the trees searching for him.

And sure enough, he spied motion at the edge of the trees. So did Telerep. Tracers walked the machine gun toward it. Then Ussmak shouted, “Hold fire!” The stream of bullets had already stopped: Telerep did know his business.

Krentel didn’t. “Why are you holding?” he demanded angrily.

“It’s not a Big Ugly, commander, just one of the animals they keep for pets,” the gunner answered in soothing tones. “Be a waste of ammunition to kill it. Besides, for a creature covered with fuzz, it’s not even that homely.”

“Yes it is,” Krentel said. Ussmak sided with Telerep. He’d seen several of these animals now, and thought them far more handsome than their masters. They were lean and graceful, obviously descended from hunting beasts. They were also friendly; he’d heard that a couple of males from another squadron had used raw meat to tame one and get a pet of their own.

“I still think we ought to kill it,” Krentel said.

“Oh, please, no, commander,” Ussmak and Telerep said in the same breath. The gunner added, “See how nice a creature it is? It’s coming straight toward us, even though we’re in a big noisy landcruiser.”

“That doesn’t make it nice,” Krentel said. “That makes it stupid, if you ask me.” But he did not order Telerep to kill the Tosevite animal.

Taking the commander’s silence as consent, Ussmak slowed the landcruiser to let the animal approach. That seemed to please it; it opened its mouth, almost as if it were a male of the Race, laughing. Ussmak knew it was making sharp yelping noises, even if he couldn’t hear them through the landcruiser’s armor. The animal ran right for the machine.

That gave Ussmak pause; maybe it really was stupid, as Krentel had said. Then the driver noticed it had a square package strapped onto its back, a package with a cylindrical rod sticking straight up from it. He’d never seen one of these beasts so accoutered before, and didn’t trust it. “Telerep!” he said sharply, “I think you’d better shoot it after all.”

“What? Why?” the gunner said. “It-” He must have spotted the package the Tosevite animal was carrying, for the machine gun started to chatter in the middle of his sentence.

Too late. By then the animal was very close to, the landcruiser. With a sudden burst of speed, it ran under the right track, even though Ussmak tried to swerve away at the last instant. The strapped-on mine exploded even as the animal was crushed to red pulp.

Ussmak felt as if he’d been kicked in the base of the tail by a Big Ugly wearing solid-iron foot coverings. The landcruiser’s right corner lifted up, then slammed back to the’ ground. Hot fragments of metal flew all around the driver; one buried itself in his arm. He screeched, then started to choke as fire-fighting foam gushed into the compartment.

He opened and closed his hand. That hurt, but he could still use it. He tried the landcruiser’s controls. The tiller jerked; a horrible grinding noise came from the right side of the machine. He snapped his jaws in fury, swore as foully as he knew how. Then he realized Krentel and Telerep were both screaming into his audio button: “What happened? Are you all right? Is the landcruiser all right?”

“We had a track blown off, may the spirits of the, Emperors of blessed memory curse the Tosevites forevermore,” Ussmak answered. He sucked in another breath that stank of foam, then spoke more formally: “Commander, this landcruiser is disabled. I suggest that we have no choice but to abandon it.” He flipped up the hatch over his head.

“Let it be done,” Krentel agreed. His voice turned vicious. “I told you to slaughter that Tosevite beast.” That he’d been right made the rebuke sting worse. As far as Ussmak was concerned, it didn’t make him a better landcruiser commander.

The driver pulled himself up and out of the compartment. It wasn’t easy; his bleeding right arm didn’t want to bear its share of his weight. He scrambled down behind the left side of the landcruiser. He would have liked to find out just what the mine had done to the other track and sprocket, but not enough to go around to the side exposed to the trees. That animal hadn’t been a wandering stray, not with a mine strapped to its back. Somewhere in the copse lay Big Uglies with guns. He was as sure of it as he was of his own name, or the Emperor’s.

Sure enough, bullets began snapping by, pinging off the armor of the landcruiser. Krentel let out a hiss of pain. “Are you all right, Commander?” Ussmak said. He still didn’t think Krentel was fit to carry Votal’s equipment bag, but the new landcruiser commander remained a male of the Race.

“No, I’m not all right,” Krentel snapped. “How can I be all right with a hole in my arm and two crewmales who are mental defectives?”

“I regret your arm is wounded,” Ussmak said. He wished the commander had been hit in the head instead. Those of lower rank gave unswerving deference to their superiors; that was the way of the Race. But the way of the Race defined obligations that ran in the other direction, too. Superiors gave underlings respect in exchange for their loyalty. Those who didn’t often brought misfortune on themselves.

Along with Ussmak and Krentel, Telerep also huddled behind the protective flank of the landcruiser. He waggled his left eye, the one that faced Ussmak, back and forth to show he was thinking along with the driver. Krentel remained oblivious to the dismay he caused his crew.

A couple of the other landcruisers in the squadron slowed down, poured suppressive fire into the trees. The hail of bullets and high-explosive shells was so intense that the wood caught fire. But when Ussmak dashed away to scramble into the landcruiser that had pulled up behind his own wounded machine, Tosevite bullets flew all around him.

He heard one of those bullets strike home with a dull, horribly final-sounding smack. He couldn’t look back; he was scrambling through the front hull hatch, almost falling down on top of the other landcruiser’s driver. That male swore. “One of your crewmales just got hit. He won’t get up, either.”

“Was it-?” But it wasn’t, Ussmak knew, for there was Krentel, nattering away over nothing in particular up in the turret. Telerep, the driver thought with a surge of pain. They’d been together all through training; they’d awakened from cold sleep side by side, within moments of each other; with Votal they’d fought their landcruiser across this seemingly endless plain. Now Votal was dead, and the landcruiser, and Telerep. And there was Krentel, nattering.

“The Big Uglies are getting too stinking good at this ambush business,” the driver of the other landcruiser said.

Ussmak didn’t answer. He’d never felt so completely alone. Among the Race, one always knew one’s place in the mosaic, and the places of those all around one. Now all those around Ussmak were gone like fallen tesserae, and he felt himself rattling around in the middle of a void.

The landcruiser grunted into motion once more, and sensibly so. No point to staying still an instant longer than needed; the Tosevites didn’t need more than a moment to work the most appalling mischief. As the armored fighting vehicle built up speed, Ussmak began to rattle around literally as well as in the bitter corners of his mind.

Here, though, he was not in the middle of a void. The driver’s compartment barely had room to hold an extra male. Worse, everything from foam spray nozzle to the bracket that held the driver’s personal weapon on the wall was hard and had sharp edges. He’d never noticed that while he was in the driver’s chair. The chair, of course, had padding and safety belts to hold him where he belonged. Now he was just jetsam, tossed in here at random.

“Too bad about your other crewmale,” the other driver said as he shoved the landcruiser up into the next higher gear. “How did your machine get hit?”

So Ussmak had to tell him about the Tosevite animal with the mine on its back, and how a moment’s kindness had cost so much. He felt half-strangled as he spoke; he couldn’t begin to say what he thought about either Krentel or Telerep, not even to a male who was a squadronmate. He hissed helplessly. That void around him again…

The driver hissed, too. “Yes, I know the beasts you mean. We haven’t bothered them, either. Now I suppose we’ll have to shoot them on sight, if the eggless Big Uglies have taken to strapping mines on their backs. Too bad.”

“Yes,” Ussmak said, and fell silent again. Rattle, rattle, rattle…

A little later, the driver of the other landcruiser made a sharp, disgusted noise. “They’re gone,” he said.

Recalled to himself, Ussmak asked, “Who’s gone?” He had no vision slits, not in his present awkward perch, and no way of seeing outside.

“The Big Uglies. All that’s here is a couple of wrecked launcher boxes for their stinking rockets. Not, even any dead ones lying around. They must have touched them off at long range, then run away.” The driver clicked off the intercom switch that connected him to the turret before he added one quiet sentence more: “This whole trip back here was for nothing.”

For nothing. The words reverberated inside Ussmak’s head. For nothing Krentel had ordered them to turn around. For nothing his landcruiser had been wrecked. For nothing Telerep had caught a bullet. For nothing Ussmak huddled here on a steel and ceramic floor, about as useful to the Race as the sack of dried meat he felt like. For nothing.

The other driver, still secure in his web, of duties rather than all alone and falling, let out a sigh of both annoyance and-infuriating to Ussmak-resignation. “So it goes,” he said.