In the Balance (47 page)

She started her firing run. The machine guns hammered under her wings. The little U-2 shook like a leaf in an autumn wind. The flying sparks of tracer bullets helped guide her aim.

Almost in the same instant, the Lizards began shooting back. They owned more firepower than the Germans had been able to bring to bear; by the muzzle flashes on the ground, Ludmila thought ten thousand automatic weapons had opened up on her all at once. The fabric skin of the
Kukuruznik’s
wings made cheerful popping noises as bullets pierced it.

Then one of the trucks blew up in a blue-white ball of hydrogen fire, so different from the orange flames of blazing petrol. The blast of heat seared Ludmila’s cheeks as she flew past; it tried to fling her aircraft tumbling out of control. She wrestled with stick and pedals, held it steady in the air.

Touched off by the first, more trucks exploded behind her. She gave the U-2 all the meager power it had, banked away toward the friendly darkness. A few Lizards kept shooting at her, but only a few; more ran to fight the fires she’d touched off. As night drew its cloak around her, she took one
hand off the stick for a moment, pounded fist against thigh. She’d hurt them this time.

Now to find her way home. Even without flying a combat mission, navigating at night was anything but easy. She straightened onto compass course 047. That would bring her somewhere close to the airstrip from which she’d been operating. She checked her watch and her airspeed indicator, the other vital tools of night flying. After about—hmm—fifty minutes, she’d begin to circle and look for landing lights.

Just surviving a mission was enough to make her proud—and to make her remember all her friends who would never fly again. That thought quickly leached joy from her, leaving behind only weariness and the jittery residue of terror.

Either she was a better navigator than she’d thought or much luckier than usual, for she spotted the dim banding lanterns after only a couple of circles. They were hooded so as not to be visible from high overhead. The Red Air Force had learned the dangers of that from the
Luftwaffe;
the lesson was all the more vital against the Lizards.

Her approach in the dark was tentative, the makeshift airstrip anything but smooth. The landing she made would have earned only scorn from her
Osoaviakhim
instructor (she wondered if the man was still alive). She didn’t care. She was down and among her own people and safe—until her next mission. She didn’t even have to think about that, not yet.

As soon as she got out of the U-2, groundcrew started dragging it to cover. A woman mechanic pointed to the bullet holes. Ludmila shrugged. “Patch them as you get the chance, comrade. I’m all right and so is the aircraft.”

“Good,” the mechanic said. “Oh—you have a letter down in the bunker.”

“A letter?” The Soviet post, erratic since the start of the war, had grown frankly chaotic once the Lizards added their ravages to those of the Nazis. Eagerly, Ludmila asked, “From whom?”

“I don’t know. It’s in an envelope, and it doesn’t say on the outside,” the mechanic answered.

“An envelope? Really?” The very occasional letters Ludmila had had from her brothers and her father and mother were all written on folded single sheets of paper, with her name and unit scrawled on the reverse. She’d had only one note since the Lizards came, three hasty lines, from her younger brother Igor, letting her know he was alive. She trotted for the shelter bunker, saying, “I’ll have to see who’s gotten rich.”

Curtains and doglegs in the entry passage kept candlelight from leaking out. Yevdokia Kasherina looked up from the tunic she was darning. “How did it go?” she asked with a fellow pilot’s concern. It was a long way from
the formal debriefings of earlier missions, but the Soviet Air Force was too dispersed and battered to have much room for formalities these days.

“Well enough,” Ludmila said. “I shot up some trucks that weren’t hidden well enough, and I got back here alive. Now what’s this I hear about a letter?”

“It’s over there on your blankets,” Yevdokia said, pointing. “You don’t think anyone would dare do anything with it, do you?”

“Better not,” Ludmila said fiercely. Both women laughed. Ludmila hurried over to where she slept. The clean, white envelope gleamed against the dark blue wool of the blankets. She snatched it up, carried it over to a candle.

She’d expected to recognize the script on the envelope at a glance, and thus know who had written to her before she started the letter itself. Hearing from any of her family would be so good … But, to her surprise and disappointment, the handwriting was unfamiliar to her. Indeed, handwriting was too good a word for it; her name and unit were printed in large copybook letters of the sort a bright eight-year-old might make.

“Who’s it from?” Yevdokia asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Ludmila said.

The other pilot laughed. “A secret admirer, Ludmila Gorbunova?”

“Hush.” Ludmila tore open the envelope, pulled out the piece of paper inside. The words on that were also printed rather than written. For a moment, they seemed utterly meaningless to her. Then she realized she had to switch languages and even alphabets: the letter was in German.

Her first reaction was fright. Before the Lizards came, a letter in German would have been delivered by a harsh-faced NKVD man certain she was guilty of treason. But censors must have seen this note and decided to let it go through. Reading it probably would not endanger her.

To the brave flier who plucked me from the kolkhoz
, it began.
Flier
had a feminine ending tacked on, and
kolkhoz
was spelled out in those copybook Cyrillic letters.
I hope you are well and safe and hitting back against the Lizards. I write this as simply as I can, as I know your German is slow, though much better than my Russian. I am now in Moscow, where I work with your government to hurt the Lizards in new ways. These will—

A few words were neatly clipped out of the letter. A censor
had
been at it, then. Some of Ludmila’s fear returned: somewhere in Moscow, her name appeared in a dossier for getting mail from a German. As long as Germany and the Soviet Union kept on working together against the Lizards, that dossier would not matter. If they had a falling out …

Ludmila read on:
I hope one day we may see each other again. This may be so, because
—The censor had excised another section. The letter finished,
Your country and mine have been enemies, allies, enemies, and now
allies again. Life is strange, not so? I hope we shall not be enemies ourselves, you and I
. The signature was a scrawl that looked to her eyes nothing like
Heinrich Jäger
, but that was surely what it said. Underneath, in the clear printing that marked the rest of the note, he had appended
Major, 16th Panzer
, as if she were unlikely to remember him without being reminded.

She stared at the piece of paper for a long time, trying to sort out her own feelings. He was polite, he was well-spoken, he was not the ugliest man she had ever seen … he was a Nazi. If she answered his letter, another note would go down in the dossier. She was as certain of that as of tomorrow’s sunrise.

“Well?” Yevgenia said when she did not comment.

“You were right, Yevgenia Gavrilovna—it
is
from a secret admirer.”

The other pilot made a rude noise. “The Devil’s nephew, no doubt.”

“How did you guess?”

11

A shell screamed down and landed in the middle of the grove of larches south of Shabbona, Illinois. Mutt Daniels threw himself flat. Splinters of wood and more deadly splinters of metal whined past overhead. “I am getting too old for this shit,” Daniels muttered to no one in particular.

A flock of black-crowned night herons—“quawks,” the locals called them, after the noise they made—leapt into the air in panic. They were handsome birds, two feet tall or more, with long yellow legs, black or sometimes dark green heads and backs, and pearl-gray wings. Quawking for all they were worth, they flew south as fast as they could go.

Mutt listened to their receding cries, but hardly looked up to watch them go. He was too busy deepening the foxhole he’d already started in the muddy ground under the larches. In the generation that had passed since he’d got back from France, he’d forgotten how fast you could dig while you were lying on your belly.

Another shell burst, this one just east of the grove. The few quawks that hadn’t taken flight at the first explosion did at this one. From a hole a few feet away from Daniels’, Sergeant Schneider said, “They likely won’t be back this year.”

“Huh?”

“The herons,” Schneider explained. “They usually head south for the winter earlier in the year than this, anyhow. They come in in April and fly out when fall starts.”

“Just like ballplayers,” Daniels said. He flipped up more dirt with his entrenching tool. “I got a bad feeling this grove ain’t gonna be the same when they come north after spring training next year. Us and the Lizards, we’re kind of rearranging the landscape, you might say.”

He didn’t find out whether Sergeant Schneider would say that or not. A whole salvo of shells crashed down around them. Both men huddled in their holes, heads down so they tasted mud. Then, from east of the larches, American artillery opened up, pounding back at the Lizard positions along
the line of Highway 51. As he had in France, Mutt wished the big guns on both sides would shoot at one another and leave the poor damned infantry alone.

Tanks, rumbled past the grove under cover of the American barrage, trying to push back the Lizard vanguard still moving on Chicago. Daniels raised his head for a moment. Some of the tanks were Lees, with a small turret and a heavy gun mounted in a sponson on the front corner of the hull. More, though, were the new Shermans; with their big main armament up in the turret, they looked like the Lizard tanks from which Daniels had been retreating since the Lizards came down from beyond the sky.

“The closer they get to Chicago, the more stuff we’re throwin’ at ’em,” he called to Schneider.

“Yeah, and a fat lot of good it’s doing us, too,” the other veteran answered. “If they weren’t spread thin trying to conquer the whole world at once, we’d be dead meat by now. Or maybe they don’t really care whether they get into Chicago or not, and that’s why they’ve moved slower than they might have.”

“What do you mean, maybe they don’t care? Why wouldn’t they?” Mutt asked. When he thought about strategy, he thought about the hit-and-run play, when to bunt, and the right time for a pitchout. Since he got home after the Armistice, he’d done his best to forget the military meaning of the word.

Schneider, though, was a career soldier. Though only a noncom, he had a feel for the way armies functioned. He said, “What good is Chicago to us? It’s a transportation hub, right, the place where all the roads and all the railroads and all the lake and river traffic come together. Just by being this close, and by their air power, the Lizards have smashed that network to smithereens.”

Daniels pointed to the advancing American tanks. “Where’d those come from, then? They must’ve got into Chicago some kind of way, or they wouldn’t be here.”

“Probably by ship,” Sergeant Schneider said. “Things I’ve heard, they don’t quite understand what ships are all about and how much you can carry on one. That probably says something about wherever they come from, wouldn’t you think?”

“Damned if I know.” Mutt looked at Sergeant Schneider with some surprise. He might have expected that remark from Sam Yeager, who’d enjoyed reading about bug-eyed monsters before people knew there were any such things. The sergeant, though, seemed to have a one-track military-mind. What was he doing wondering about other planets or whatever you called them?

As if to answer the question Mutt hadn’t asked, Schneider said, “The more we know about the Lizards, the better we can fight back, right?”

“I guess so,” said Daniels, who hadn’t thought of it in quite those terms.

“And speaking of fighting back, we ought to be moving up to give those tanks some support.” Schneider scrambled out of his foxhole, shouted and waved one arm so the rest of the troops in the grove would know what he meant, and dashed out into the open.