Striking the Balance (14 page)

Auerbach thought about going back and calling him on it, then decided he liked it and kept on toward the colonel’s office.

The Tosevite hatchling made a squealing noise that grated in Ttomalss’ hearing diaphragms. It reached up for the handle of a low cabinet, grabbed hold on about the third try, and did its best to pull itself upright. Its best wasn’t good enough. It fell back down, splat.

Ttomalss watched curiously to see what it would do next. Sometimes, after a setback like that, it would wail, which he found even more irritating than its squeals. Sometimes it thought a fall was funny, and let out one of its annoyingly noisy laughs.

Today, rather to Ttomalss’ surprise, it did neither of those. It just reached up and tried again, as deliberate and purposeful an action as he’d ever seen from it. It promptly fell down again, and banged its chin on the floor. This time, it did start to wail, the cry it made to let the world know it was in pain.

When it did that, it annoyed everyone up and down the corridor of the starship orbiting above Tosev 3. When the other males researching the Big Uglies got annoyed, they grew more likely to side against Ttomalss in his struggle to keep the hatchling and keep studying it rather than returning it to the female from whose body it had emerged.

“Be silent, foolish thing,” he hissed at it. The hatchling, of course, took no notice of him, but continued to make the air hideous with its howls. He knew what he had to do: he stooped and, being careful not to prick its thin, scaleless skin with his claws, held it against his torso.

After a little while, the alarming noise eased. The hatchling liked physical contact. Young of the Race, when newly out of the eggshell, fled from anything larger than they were, instinctively convinced it would catch and eat them. For the first part of their lives, Big Uglies were as immobile as some of the limestone-shelled creatures of Home’s small seas. If they got into trouble, the females who’d ejected them (and a hideous process
that
was, too) had to save them and comfort them. With no such female available here, the job fell to Ttomalss.

The hatchling’s cheek rubbed against his chest. That touched off its sucking reflex. It turned its head and pressed its soft, wet mouth against his hide. Unlike a Tosevite female, he did not secrete nutritive fluid. Little by little, the hatchling was realizing that faster than it had.

“A good thing, too,” Ttomalss muttered, and tacked on an emphatic cough. The little Tosevite’s saliva did unpleasant things to his body paint. He swung down an eye turret so he could look at himself. Sure enough, he’d have to touch up a spot before he was properly presentable. He hadn’t intended to demonstrate experimentally that body paint was not toxic to Big Uglies, but he’d done it.

He turned the other eye turret down, studied the hatchling with both eyes. It looked up at him. Its own eyes were small and flat and dark. He wondered what went on behind them. The hatching had never seen itself, nor its own kind. Did it think it looked like him? No way to know, not until its verbal skills developed further. But its perceptions would have changed by then, too.

He watched the corners of its absurdly mobile mouth curl upwards. Among the Tosevites, that was an expression of amiability, so he had succeeded in making it forget about its hurt. Then he noticed the cloth he kept around its middle was wet. The Tosevite had no control over its bodily function. Interrogations suggested Big Uglies did not learn such control for two or three of their years—four to six of those by which Ttomalss reckoned. As he carried the hatchling over to a table to clean it off and set a new protective cloth in place, he found that a very depressing prospect.

“You
are
a nuisance,” he said, adding another emphatic cough.

The hatchling squealed, then made a noise of its own that sounded like an emphatic cough. It had been imitating the sounds Ttomalss made more and more lately, not just emphatic and interrogative coughs but sometimes real words. Sometimes he thought it was making those noises with deliberate intent. Tosevites could and did talk, often to excess—no doubt about that.

When the hatchling was clean and dry and content, he set it back down on the floor. He tossed the soaked cloth into an airtight plastic bin to prevent its ammoniacal reek from spreading, then squirted cleansing foam on his hands. He found the Tosevites’ liquid wastes particularly disgusting; the Race excreted neat, tidy solids.

The hatchling got up on all fours and crawled toward the cabinets again. Its quadrupedal gait was much more confident than it had been at the beginning; for a couple of days, the only way it had been able to get anywhere was backwards. It tried pulling itself erect—and promptly fell down once more.

The communicator chimed for attention. Ttomalss hurried over to it. The screen lit, showing him the image of Ppevel, assistant administrator for the eastern region of the main continental mass. “I greet you, superior sir,” Ttomalss said, doing his best to hide nervousness.

“I greet you, Research Analyst,” Ppevel replied. “I trust the Tosevite hatchling whose fate is now under discussion with the Chinese faction known as the People’s Liberation Army remains healthy?”

“Yes, superior sir,” Ttomalss said. He turned one eye turret away from the screen for a moment, trying to spot the hatchling. He couldn’t. That worried him. The little creature was much more mobile than it had been, which meant it was much more able to get into mischief, too . . .  He’d missed some of what Ppevel was saying. “I’m sorry, superior sir?”

Ppevel waggled his eye turrets ever so slightly, a sign of irritation. “I said, are you prepared to give up the hatchling on short notice?”

“Superior sir, of course I am, but I do protest that this abandonment is not only unnecessary but also destructive to a research program vital for the successful administration of this world after it is conquered and pacflied.” Ttomalss looked around for the hatchling again, and still didn’t see it. In a way, that was almost a relief. How could he turn it over to the Chinese if he didn’t know where it was?

“No definitive decision on this matter has yet been made. If that is your concern,” the administrator said. “If one is reached, however, rapid implementation will be mandatory.”

“At need, it shall be done, and promptly,” Ttomalss said, hoping he could keep relief from his voice. “I understand the maniacal stress the Big Uglies sometimes place on speedy performance.”

“If you do understand it, you have the advantage over most males of the Race,” Ppevel said. “The Tosevites have sped through millennia of technical development in a relative handful of years. I have heard endless speculation as to the root causes of this: the peculiar geography, the perverse and revolting sexual habits the Big Uglies practice—”

“This latter thesis has been central to my own research, superior sir,” Ttomalss answered. “The Tosevites certainly differ in their habits from ourselves, the Rabotevs, and the Hallessi. My hypothesis is that their constant sexual tensions, to use an imprecise simile, are like a fire continually simmering under them and stimulating them to ingenuity in other areas.”

“I have seen and heard more hypotheses than I care to remember,” Ppevel said. “When I find one with supporting evidence, I shall be pleased. Our analysts these days too often emulate the Tosevites not only in speed but also in imprecision.”

“Superior sir, I wish to retain the Tosevite hatching precisely so I can gather such evidence,” Ttomalss said. “Without studying the Big Uglies at all stages of their development, how can we hope to understand them?”

“A point to be considered,” Ppevel admitted, which made Ttomalss all but glow with hope; no administrator had given him so much reason for optimism in a long time. Ppevel continued, “We—”

Ttomalss wanted to hear more, but was distracted by a yowl—an alarmed yowl—from the Big Ugly hatchling. It also sounded oddly far away. “Excuse me, superior sir, but I believe I have encountered a difficulty,” the researcher said, and broke the connection.

He hurried along the corridors of his laboratory area, looking to see what the hatchling had managed to get itself into this time. He didn’t see it anywhere, which worried him—had it managed to crawl inside a cabinet? Was that why its squawks sounded distant?

Then it wailed again. Ttomalss went dashing out into the corridor—the hatchling had taken it into its head to go exploring.

Ttomalss almost collided with Tessrek, another researcher into the habits and thought patterns of the Big Uglies. In his arms, none too gently, Tessrek carried the wayward Tosevite hatchling. He thrust it at Ttomalss. “Here. This is yours. Kindly keep better track of it in future. It came wandering into my laboratory chamber, and, I assure you, it is not welcome there.”

As soon as Ttomalss took hold of it, the hatchling stopped wailing. It knew him, and knew he cared for it. He might as well have been its mother, a Tosevite term with implications far more powerful than its equivalent in the language of the Race.

Tessrek went on, “The sooner you give that thing back to the Big Uglies, the happier everyone else along this corridor will be. No more hideous noises, no more dreadful stenches—a return to peace and quiet and order.”

“The hatchling’s ultimate disposition has not yet been determined,” Ttomalss said. Tessrek had always wanted the little Tosevite gone. Its jaunt today would only give him fresh ammunition.

“Getting rid of it will improve my disposition,” he said, and let his mouth fall open in appreciation of his own joke. Then he grew serious once more: “If you must have it, keep it in your own area. I cannot answer for its safety if it invades my laboratory once more.”

“Like any hatchling, it is as yet ignorant of proper behavior,” Ttomalss said coldly. “If you ignore that obvious fact and deliberately mistreat it, I cannot answer for
your
safety.” To make sure he’d made his point, he turned and carried the hatchling back into his own chamber. With one eye turret, he watched Tessrek staring after him.

IV

An ugly little tracked ammunition carrier came
put-putting
up to the Panthers halted in the forest north of Lodz. The front hatch of the French-built machine—booty from the triumphant campaign of 1940—opened and a couple of men scrambled out, calling, “Here, lads! We’ve got presents for you.”

“About time,” Heinrich Jäger said. “We were down to our last few rounds for each panzer.”

“That’s not where you want to be against the Lizards, either,” Gunther Grillparzer added. The gunner went on, “Their armor is so good, you can waste a lot of hits before you get one penetration.”

The ammunition haulers grinned. They wore one-piece coveralls like the panzer crewmen, but in the field-gray of self-propelled gun units rather than panzer black. One of them said, “New toys for you here—a notion we borrowed from the Lizards and put into production for ourselves.”

That was plenty to get the panzer men crowding around them. Jäger took shameless advantage of his rank to push his way to the front. “What do you have?” he demanded.

“We’ll show you, sir,” the fellow who’d spoken before answered. He turned to his companion. “Show them, Fritz.”

Fritz went around to the back of the Lorraine hauler, undid the whitewashed canvas tilt on top of the storage bin at the rear of the machine. He reached in and, grunting a little at the weight, drew out the oddest-looking shell Jäger had ever seen. “What the devil is it?” half a dozen men asked at once.

“You tell ’em, Joachim,” Fritz said. “I never can say it right”

“Armor-piercing discarding sabot,” Joachim said importantly. “See, the aluminum sabot fits your gun barrel, but as soon as it gets out, it falls off, and the round proper goes out with a lot more muzzle velocity than you can get any other way. It’s capped with wolfram, too, for extra penetration.”

“Is that so?” Jäger pricked up his ears. “My brother is a panzer engineer, and he says wolfram is in short supply even for machine tools. Now they’re releasing it for antipanzer rounds?”

“I don’t know anything about machine tools,
Herr Oberst,”
Joachim said, and Fritz’s head solemnly bobbed up and down to signify he didn’t know anything, either. “But I do know these shells are supposed to give you half again as much penetration as you get with regular capped armor-piercing ammunition.”

“Are supposed to give you.” That was Karl Mehler, Jäger’s loader. Loaders had an inherently pessimistic view of the world. When panzers were moving, they didn’t see much of it. They stayed down in the bottom of the turret, doing what the gunner and the commander ordered. If you were a loader, you never had a clue before a shell slammed into your machine. One second, you’d be fine; the next, butchered and burnt. Mehler went on, “How good are they really?”

Fritz and Joachim looked at each other. Fritz said, “They wouldn’t issue them to front-line units if they didn’t think they’d perform as advertised, would they?”

“You never can tell,” Mehler said darkly. “Some poor slobs have to be the guinea pigs, I suppose. We must have drawn the short straw this time.”

“That’s enough, Karl,” Jäger said. The rebuke was mild, but plenty to make the loader shut up. Jäger turned to the men with the munitions conveyor. “Do you have any of our conventional armor-piercing rounds to use in case these things aren’t as perfect as the people away from the firing line seem to think?”

“Uh, no, sir,” Joachim answered. “This is what came off the train, so this is what we have.”

The mutters that rose from the panzer crewmen weren’t quite rumbles of mutiny, but they weren’t rapturous sighs, either. Jäger sighed, also not rapturously. “Well, we all still have a few rounds of the old issue, anyhow. We know what that will do—and what it won’t. Tell me one thing right now, you two: is this new round supposed to be able to pierce the frontal armor of a Lizard panzer?”

Regretfully, the ammunition resupply men shook their heads.
“Herr Oberst,
the next round that can do that will be the first,” Joachim said.

“I was afraid you were going to say as much,” Jäger answered. “The way things are now, it costs us anywhere between six and ten panzers, on average, for every Lizard machine we manage to kill—that’s just panzer against panzer, mind you. It would be even worse if we didn’t have better crews than they do—but we’ve lost so many veterans that our edge there is going. The thing that would help us most is a gun that would let us meet them face-to-face.”

“The thing that would help us most is another one of those bombs that they set off outside of Breslau and Rome,” Gunther Grillparzer put in. “And I know just where to set it, too.”

“Where’s that?” Jäger asked, curious to see what his gunner used for a sense of strategy.

“Lodz,” Grillparzer answered promptly. “Right in the middle of town. Blast all the Lizards and all the kikes there to kingdom come, just like that.” He was wearing gloves, so instead of snapping his fingers he spat in the snow.

“Wouldn’t mind getting rid of the Lizards,” Jäger agreed. “The Jews—” He shrugged. “Anielewicz said he’d keep the Lizards from mounting a counterattack out of the city, and he’s done it. He deserves the credit for it, too. If you ask me.”

“Yes, sir.” The gunner’s round, fleshy face went sullen, not that Grillparzer didn’t look a little sullen most of the time. He knew better than to argue with his regimental commander, but he wasn’t about to think warm, kind thoughts about any Jews, either.

Jäger glanced around the rest of the panzer crewmen. Nobody disagreed with him, not out loud, but nobody sprang up to say anything nice about the Jews in the Lodz ghetto. That worried Jäger. He wasn’t massively enamored of Jews himself, but he’d been horrflied when he learned what German forces had done to them in the areas the
Reich
had conquered. He hadn’t wanted to learn about such things, but he’d had his nose rubbed in them, and he was not the sort of man who could pretend he was blind when be wasn’t. A lot of German officers, he’d found to his dismay, had no trouble at all managing that.

Right this second, though, he didn’t have to think about it “Let’s share out what they’ve brought us,” he told his men. “If all you’ve got is a dead pig, you eat pork chops.”

“This stuff is liable to turn us all into dead pigs,” Karl Mehler muttered under his breath, but that didn’t keep him from taking his fair share of the newfangled rounds. He stowed them in the Panther’s ammunition bins. “It doesn’t look right,” he grumbled when he scrambled back out of the panzer. “It looks funny. We’ve never had anything like it before.”

“Intelligence says one of the reasons we drive the Lizards crazy is that we keep coming up with new things,” Jäger said. “They don’t change, or don’t change much. Do you want to be like them?”

“Well, no, sir, but I don’t want to change for the worse, either, and not for the hell of it,” Mehler said. “These things look like a sausage sticking out of a bun, like some engineer is having a joke with us.”

“They don’t pay off on looks,” Jäger answered. “If these new shells don’t work the way they’re supposed to, then somebody’s head rolls. First, though, we have to find out.”

“If these new shells don’t work the way they’re supposed to, our heads roll,” Karl Mehler said. “Maybe somebody else’s head rolls afterwards, but we won’t get to watch that.”

Since Mehler was right, the only thing Jäger could do was glare at him. With a shrug, the loader climbed back into the turret. A moment later, Gunther Grillparzer followed him. Jäger climbed in, too, and flipped up the lid to the cupola so he could stand up and see what he was doing. The driver, Johannes Drucker, and the hull gunner, Bernhard Steinfeldt, took their positions at the front of the Panther’s fighting compartment.

The big Maybach petrol engine started up. Steam and stinking exhaust roared from the tailpipe. All through the clearing, Panthers, Tigers, and Panzer IVs were coming to life. Jäger really thought of it that way: they seemed like so many dinosaurs exhaling on a cold winter’s morning.

Drucker rocked the Panther back and forth, going from low gear to reverse and back, to break up the ice that accumulated overnight between the panzer’s interleaved road wheels. That freeze-up problem was the only drawback to the suspension; it gave a smooth ride over rugged terrain. But sometimes even rocking the panzer wouldn’t free up the road wheels. Then you had to light a fire to melt the ice before you could get going. If the enemy attacked you instead of the other way around, that could prove hazardous to your life expectancy.

But today, the Germans were hunters, not hunted—at least for the moment. The panzers rolled out of the clearing. With them came a few self-propelled guns and a couple of three-quarter-tracked carriers full of infantrymen. Some of the foot soldiers carried hand-held antipanzer rockets—another idea stolen from the Lizards. Jäger thought about remarking on that to his crewmen, but decided not to bother. They were doing fine as things stood.

Against the Poles, against the French, against the Russians, the
Wehrmacht
panzers had charged out ahead of the infantry, cutting great gaps in the forces of the enemy. Do that against the Lizards and your head would roll, sure as sure. The only way you had any hope of shifting them was with a combined-arms operation—and even then, you’d better outnumber them.

Jäger would have been just as well content to find no trace of the aliens. He knew how many times he’d been lucky. Christ crucflied, he’d killed a Lizard panzer with the 50mm gun of a Panzer III back in the days when the Lizards had just come to Earth, and if that wasn’t luck, he didn’t know what was. And here he was, almost two years later, still alive and still unmaimed. Not many who’d seen as much action could say the same.

Up ahead, the trees thinned out. He got on the all-vehicles wireless circuit. “We’ll halt at the forest’s edge to reconnoiter.” Charge out into open country and you deserved to get slaughtered.

Foot soldiers in winter white got down from their carriers and trotted ghostlike out across the snow-covered fields. A couple of them had rocket launchers (also whitewashed) on their backs; the rest carried MP-40 submachine guns. Jäger had heard Hugo Schmeisser wasn’t involved with the design of that weapon, but it got called a Schmeisser just the same.

From behind a barn, a machine gun started chattering, kicking up clumps of snow. The
Wehrmacht
men out in the open dove for whatever cover they could find. Two panzers fired high-explosive shells at the barn to flush out the Lizards in back of it. Not ten seconds later, one of those panzers brewed up, flame and smoke spurting from every hatch and out the top of the cupola.

Jäger’s mouth went dry. “That’s a Lizard panzer there,” he shouted into the microphone to his wireless set. It was stating the obvious—overstating the obvious—but it had to be said.

“Armor-piercing,” Gunther Grillparzer said to Karl Mehler. “Give me one of the new rounds—we’ll see what they can do.”

“If they can do anything,” Mehler said gloomily, but he slammed one of the aluminum-sabot rounds into the breach of the Panther’s long 75mm cannon. With a clang, Grillparzer closed it.

“Range?” Jäger asked.

“Long, sir,” the gunner answered. “Better than fifteen hundred meters.”

Jäger grunted. He didn’t see any other good hiding places for panzers ahead, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any. Even against the one, sending his own panzers out to flank it was more likely to get them picked off one at a time than anything else. The Lizard panzer’s turret had a powered traverse, about which Jäger was fearfully jealous.

He couldn’t just sit here, either. Even if he’d bumped into the last of the Lizard rear guard, that panzer could call down artillery on his head or maybe even summon a helicopter or two. With their rockets, Lizard helicopters made nasty antipanzer weapons, and they chewed up infantry like teething biscuits.

The barn started to burn, the sole result of the high-explosive shells the Germans had thrown at it That was a break; the smoke would screen his panzers from the Lizards’ eyes, at least until they shifted position. And, set alongside his other options, flanking out the Lizard panzer didn’t look so bad after all.