Striking the Balance (74 page)

Gunther, Johannes—“You are the men from Colonel Jäger’s panzer, not so?” Ludmila called quietly. “Is he—is he here, too?” No point pretending she didn’t care; they couldn’t help knowing about her and Jäger.

The panzer crewmen stopped in their tracks, almost as if they’d run into an invisible wall. “No, he’s not here,” one of them—Gunther, she thought—answered. He spoke hardly above a whisper, as if he didn’t want his words to go beyond the span of the
Storch’s
wings.

Ice ran down Ludmila’s back. “Tell me!” she said. “Is he hurt? Is he dead? Did it happen before the cease-fire started? Tell me!”

“He’s not dead—yet,” Gunther said, even more softly than before. “He’s not even hurt—yet. And no, it didn’t happen in the fighting with the Lizards. It happened three days ago, as a matter of fact.”

“What
happened?” Ludmila demanded.

Maddeningly, Gunther fell silent. After a moment when Ludmila felt like yanking out her pistol and extorting answers at gunpoint. If need be, the crewman named Johannes said, “Miss, the SS arrested him.”

“Bozhemoi,”
Ludmila whispered. “Why? What could he have done? Was it on account of me?”

“Damned if we know,” Johannes said. “This weedy little SS pigdog came up, pointed a gun at him, and marched him away. Stinking blackshirt bastard—who does he think he is, arresting the best commander we’ve ever had?”

His crewmen muttered profane agreement. It would have been loud profane agreement, except they were all veterans, and wary of letting anyone outside their circle know their thoughts.

One of them said, “Come on, boys, we’re supposed to be loading ammo into this miserable little plane.”

“It has to be because of me,” Ludmila said. She’d always worried the NKVD would descend on her because of Jäger; now, instead, his nation’s security forces had seized him on account of her. That struck her as frightful and dreadfully unfair. “Is there any way to get him free?”

“From the SS?” said the crewman who’d just urged getting the 7.92mm rounds aboard the
Storch.
He sounded incredulous; evidently the Nazis invested their watchdogs with the same fearsome, almost supernatural powers the Russian people attributed to the NKVD.

But the tankman called Gunther said, “Christ crucified, why not? You think Skorzeny would sit around on his can and let anything happen to Colonel Jäger, no matter who’d grabbed him? My left nut he would! He’s an SS man, yes, but he’s a real soldier, too, not just a damned traffic cop in a black shirt. Shit. If we can’t break the colonel out, we don’t deserve to be panzer troopers. Come on!” He was aflame with the idea.

That cautious crewman spoke up again: “All right, what if we do break him out? Where does he go after that?”

No one answered him for a couple of seconds. Then Johannes let out a noise that would have been a guffaw if he hadn’t put a silencer on it. He pointed to the Fieseler
Storch.
“We’ll break him out, we’ll stick him on the plane, and the lady pilot can fly him the hell out of here. If the SS has its hooks in him, he won’t want to stick around anyhow, that’s for damn sure.”

The other panzer crewmen crowded around him, pumping his hand and pounding him on the back. So did Ludmila. Then she said, “Can you do this without danger to yourselves?”

“Just watch us,” Johannes said. He started away from the
Storch,
calling, “The pilot’s got engine troubles. We’re going to get a mechanic.” And off they went, tramping through the night with sudden purpose in their stride.

Ludmila, left by herself, thought about loading some of the German ammunition into the
Storch
herself. In the end, she decided not to. She might want every gram of power the light plane had, and extra weight aboard would take some away.

A cricket chirped, somewhere out in the darkness. Waiting stretched. Her hand went to the butt of the Tokarev she wore on her hip. If shooting broke out, she’d run toward it. But, except for insects, the night stayed silent.

One of the
Wehrmacht
men who marked out the landing strip with lanterns called to her:
“Alles gut, Fräulein?”

“Ja,”
she answered.
“Alles gut.”
How much of a liar was she?

Booted feet trotting on dirt, coming closer fast . . .  Ludmila stiffened. All she could see, out there in the grass-scented night, were moving shapes. She couldn’t even tell how many till they got close. One, two, three, four . . . five!

“Ludmila?” Was it? It was! Jäger’s voice.

“Da!”
she answered, forgetting her German.

Something glittered. One of the panzer men with Jäger plunged a knife into the dirt again and again—to clean it, maybe—before he set it back in the sheath on his belt. When he spoke, he proved to have Gunther’s voice: “Get the colonel out of here, lady pilot We didn’t leave any eyes to see who we were”—his hand caressed the hilt of the knife again, just for a moment—“and everybody here is part of the regiment. Nobody’ll rat on us—we did what needed doing, that’s all.”

“You’re every one of you crazy, that’s all,” Jäger said, warm affection in his voice. His crewman crowded round him, pressing his hand, hugging him, wishing him well. That would have told Ludmila everything she needed to know about him as an officer, but she’d already formed her own conclusions there.

She pointed to the dim shapes of the ammunition crates. “You’ll have to get rid of those,” she reminded the tankmen. “They were supposed to come with me.”

“We’ll take care of it, lady pilot,” Gunther promised. “We’ll take care of everything. Don’t you worry about it. We may be criminals,
ja,
but by Jesus we’re not half-assed criminals.” The other tankers rumbled low-voiced agreement.

Ludmila was willing to believe German efficiency extended to crime. She tapped Jäger on the shoulder to separate him from his comrades, then pointed to the open door of the Fieseler
Storch.
“Get in,” she said. “Take the rear seat, the one with the machine gun.”

“We’d better not have to use it,” he answered, hooking a foot in the stirrup at the bottom of the fuselage that let him climb up onto the wing and into the cockpit. Ludmila followed. She pulled down the door and dogged it shut. Her finger stabbed at the self-starter. The motor caught. She watched the soldiers scatter, glad she hadn’t had to ask one to spin the prop for her.

“Have you got your belt on?” she asked Jäger. When he said yes, she let the
Storch
scoot forward across the field: the acceleration might have shoved her passenger out of his seat if he hadn’t been strapped in place.

As usual, the light plane needed only a handful of ground on which to take off. After one last hard bump, it sprang into the air. Jäger leaned to one side to peer down at the landing strip. So did Ludmila, but there wasn’t much to see. Now that they were airborne, the fellows with the lanterns had doused them. She supposed—she hoped—they were helping Jäger’s crewmen get the ammunition either under cover or back into the regimental store.

Over her shoulder, she asked him, “Are you all right?”

“Pretty much so,” he answered. “They hadn’t done much of the strongarm stuff yet—they weren’t sure how big a traitor I am.” He laughed bitterly, then amazed her by going on, “A lot bigger than they ever imagined, I’ll tell you that. Where are we going?”

Ludmila was swinging the
Storch
back toward the east. “I was going to take you to the partisan unit I’ve been with for a while. No one will try and come after you there, I shouldn’t think; we’ll have a good many kilometers between us and German-held territory. Is that good enough?”

“No, not nearly,” he said, again surprising her. “Can you fly me down to Lodz? If you like, you can let me out of the airplane and go back to the partisans yourself. But I have to go there, no matter what.”

“Why?” She could hear the hurt in her own voice. Here at last they had the chance to be together and stay together and . . .  “What could be so important in Lodz?”

“That’s a long story,” Jäger said, and then proceeded to compress it with a forceful brevity that showed his officer’s discipline. The more he talked, the wider Ludmila’s eyes got—no, the SS hadn’t arrested him on account of her, not at all. He finished, “And so. If I don’t get back into Lodz, Skorzeny is liable to blow up the town and all the people and Lizards in it. And if he does that, what becomes of the cease-fire? What becomes of the
Vaterland?
And what becomes of the world?”

Ludmila didn’t answer for a few seconds. Then, very quietly, she said, “Whatever you call yourself, you weren’t a traitor.” She gained a little altitude before swinging the
Storch
in a rightward bank. Numbers spun round the dial of the compass on the instrument panel till it steadied on south-southeast “We’ll both go to Lodz,” Ludmila said.

XIX

Ttomalss must have slept through the opening of the outer door to the building that confined him. The sharp click of the lock to the inner door, though, brought him up to his feet from the hard floor, his eye turrets swiveling wildly as he tried to see what was going on. Next to no light came through the narrow window that illuminated and ventilated his cell.

Fear coursed through him. The Big Uglies had never come here at night before. Like any male of the Race, he found a break in routine threatening in and of itself. This particular change, he suspected, would have felt ominous even to a Tosevite.

The door opened. Not one but three Big Uglies came in. Each carried in one hand a lantern burning some smelly fat or oil and in the other a submachine gun. The lanterns were primitive: much the sort of tools the Race had expected the natives of Tosev 3 to possess. The submachine guns, unfortunately, were not.

In the dim, flickering light, Ttomalss needed a moment to recognize Liu Han. “Superior female!” he gasped when he did. She did not answer right away, but stood looking at him. He commended his spirit to Emperors past, confident they would care for it better than the Race’s authorities had protected his body while he lived.

“Be still!” Liu Han snapped. Ttomalss waited for the weapon in her hand to stitch him full of holes. Instead of shooting him, though, she set it on the floor. She pulled out something she had tucked into the waist of her cloth leg-covering: a sack made of coarse, heavy fabric.

While the two males with her kept their submachine guns pointed at Ttomalss, Liu Han came up to him and pulled the sack down over his head. He stood frozen, not daring to resist.
If they shoot me now, I will not see the guns go off before the bullets strike,
he thought. Liu Han tied the bag closed around his neck, not quite tight enough to choke off his breath.

“Can he see?” one of the males asked. Then the fellow spoke directly to Ttomalss: “Can you see, miserable scaly devil?”

Miserable Ttomalss was. “No, superior sir,” he answered truthfully.

Liu Han shoved him. He almost fell over. When he recovered, she put a hand in the middle of his back. “You walk in the directions I choose for you,” she said, first in Chinese and then in the language of the Race. “Only in those directions.” She used an emphatic cough.

“It shall be done,” Ttomalss gasped. Maybe they were just taking him out to shoot him somewhere else. But if they were, wouldn’t they have told him as much, so they could enjoy his terrified anticipation? Big Uglies were dreadfully sophisticated when it came to inflicting pain.

Liu Han shoved him again, lightly this time. He walked forward till she said, “Go left,” and emphasized that by moving the hand on his back in the appropriate way. He turned to the left. Why not? In the sphere of blackness in which he moved, one direction was as good as another. A little later, Liu Han said, “Go right.” Ttomalss went right.

He had not known where he was when he set out. Had he known, he soon would have become hopelessly lost. He turned right and left and right and left tens of times, with what seemed to him random intervals and choices. The streets of Peking were very quiet. He guessed it was somewhere between the middle of the night and dawn, but could not be certain.

At last, Liu Han said, “Stop.” Ttomalss did, in apprehension. Was this the moment? Was this the place? Liu Han untied the cord fastening the cloth sack over his head. She said, “Count to one hundred, out loud, slowly, in your language. Then lift off the hood. If you lift it before you reach one hundred, you
will
die at once. Do you understand?”

“Y-Yes, superior female,” Ttomalss quavered. “It shall be done. One . . .  two . . . three . . .” He went on, as steadily as he could: “Ninety-eight . . . ninety-nine . . . one hundred.” As he reached for the sack, he waited for bullets to tear into him. He yanked the cloth from his head in a quick, convulsive gesture.

No one shot him. His eye turrets scanned all around. He was alone, at the mouth of one of Peking’s innumerable little
hutungs.
He threw down the sack. The soft
thwap!
it made hitting the ground was the only sound that reached his hearing diaphragms. Ever so cautiously, he stepped out into the street onto which the
hutung
opened.

To his amazement, he recognized it. It was the Lower Slanting Street, in Chinese the
Hsia Hsieh Chieh.
And there stood the ruins of the
Ch’ang Ch’un Ssu,
the Temple of Everlasting Spring. He knew how to get back to the Race’s headquarters in the center of Peking. He did not know if he would be allowed to do so, but he knew he had to try. The Lower Slanting Street even led in the right direction.

Before long, he ran into a patrol of males of the Race. Where the Tosevites had let him go, the patrol almost shot him before recognizing him as one of their own.
That
would have been an irony on which to end his career! But when he told them who he was, they hurried him off to the thoroughly fortified citadel the Race retained in what had been the Forbidden City.

He was pleased to find his arrival important enough to justify rousing Ppevel. Soon the assistant administrator, eastern region, main continental mass, came into the chamber where Ttomalss was enjoying proper food for the first time in ever so long and said, “I am glad to see you at liberty once more, Researcher. The Tosevites informed us yesterday they would release you, but they are not always reliable in their assertions, as you know.”

“Truth, superior sir—as I know too well,” Ttomalss said with an emphatic cough. “Did they say
why
they were releasing me? To me, they never gave a reason.” Without waiting for an answer, he dug into the plate of fried worms the cooks had given him. Even though they’d been desiccated for the trip to Tosev 3 and then reconstituted, they were still a taste of Home.

Ppevel said, “By their messages, partly as a goodwill gesture and partly as a warning: typical of the Big Uglies to try to do both at once.” As if to give his words a different sort of emphatic cough, a rattle of gunfire broke out, off in the distance. He went on, “They say this shows us they can move at will through this city and other cities in this not-empire, releasing whom they will, taking whom they will, killing whom they will. They warn us the struggle to integrate China into the Empire will fail.”

Before coming down to the surface of Tosev 3, perhaps even before his kidnapping, Ttomalss would have found that laughable, ludicrous. Now—“They are determined, superior sir, and they are both ingenious and surprisingly well armed. I fear they may trouble us for years, maybe generations, to come.”

“It could be so,” Ppevel admitted, which surprised Ttomalss.

He said, “While I was a captive, the female Liu Han claimed the Race had granted certain Tosevite not-empires a cease-fire. Can this be so?”

“It can. It is,” Ppevel said. “These are the not-empires capable of producing their own nuclear weapons and desperate enough to use them against us. China—all of its factions—has no such weapons, and is excluded from the cease-fire. This offends the Chinese, or so it would seem, and so they redouble their annoyances in an effort to be included.”

“The Race—treating with barbarous Tosevites as if they were equals?” Ttomalss looked up toward the ceiling in wonder and dismay. “Even from your mouth, superior sir, I have trouble believing it.”

“It’s truth nonetheless,” Ppevel answered. “Even with these Chinese, we have negotiated, as you know, though we have not granted them the concessions the other not-empires have gained. We shall share dominion of this planet with the Tosevites until the colonization fleet arrives. Perhaps we shall share it after the colonization fleet arrives. I would not care to guess as to that. It is the fleetlord’s decision, not mine.”

Ttomalss’ head reeled, almost as if he had ingested too much of the Tosevite herb so many males found alluring. So much had changed while he lay in captivity! He would have to work hard to adapt himself, always unsettling to the Race. He said, “We shall need more than ever, then, to seek to understand the essential nature of the Big Uglies.”

“Truth,” Ppevel agreed. “When you are physically recovered from your ordeal, Researcher, we shall obtain for you, with the greatest discretion possible, a new Tosevite hatchling, with which you can resume your interrupted work.”

“Thank you, superior sir,” Ttomalss said, his voice far more hollow than he would have expected. After what had happened to him with the last hatching—with Liu Mei, he made himself remember—the work that had once consumed him now seemed liable to be more dangerous than it was worth. “With your generous permission, superior sir, I shall carry on this research back aboard a starship laboratory rather than here on the surface of Tosev 3.”

“That may well be arranged,” Ppevel said.

“Thank you, superior sir,” Ttomalss repeated. He hoped the distance between the surface and the cleanness of open space would protect him from Big Uglies wild for revenge because of their familial and sexual structure. He hoped so—but he was not so confident of it as he had been in the days when Tosev 3 was new and conquest had seemed certain to be quick and easy. He cherished that certainty, and knew he would never have its like again.

Patients and refugees crowded around the Lizard with the fancy body paint and the hand-held electrified megaphone. Rance Auerbach moved up slowly and carefully—the only way of moving he had—to get as good a vantage point as he could. Since so many other people had as much trouble moving as he did, he got up pretty close, almost to the gun-toting guards around the speaker.

He looked around for Penny Summers and spotted her on the opposite side of the crowd. He waved to her, but she didn’t see him.

The electrified megaphone made flatulent noises. Somewhere close by, a child laughed. Then, in pretty fair English, the Lizard began to speak: “We leave this place now. The Race and the government of this not-empire here, the United States, we make agreement now. No more fight. The Race to leave the land of the United States. That include this place, this Karval, Colorado, too.”

He couldn’t go on, not right away. A buzz ran through the crowd, and then a cheer. A woman started singing “God Bless America.” Inside the second line of the song, everybody there was singing with her. Tears stung Auerbach’s eyes. The Lizards were leaving! They had won. Even getting shot up suddenly seemed worth it.

When the singing stopped, the Lizard resumed: “You free now, yes.” More cheers rang out. “We go now.” Auerbach cut loose with a Rebel yell: more of a coughing yip than the wild shriek he’d wanted, but good enough. The Lizard went on, “Now you free, now we go—now we not have to take care for you no more. We go, we leave not-empire of United States to take care for you now. They do it or nobody do it. We go now. That is all.”

The Lizard guards had to gesture threateningly with their weapons before the people would clear aside and let them and the speaker out. For a few dreadful seconds, Auerbach was afraid they would start shooting. With people packed so tight around them, that would have been a slaughter.

He made his halting way toward Penny Summers. This time, she did spot him, and moved, far more nimbly than he could, to meet him. “What did that scaly bastard mean, exactly?” she asked. “Way he was talking, it sounded like the Lizards are just gonna up and leave us on our own.”

“They couldn’t do that,” Auerbach said. “There’s what?—thousands of people here, and a lot of ’em—me, for instance—aren’t what you’d call good at getting around. What are we supposed to do, walk to the American lines up near Denver?” He laughed at the absurdity of the notion.

But the Lizards didn’t think it was absurd. They piled into trucks and armored personnel carriers and rolled out of Karval that afternoon, heading east, back toward wherever their spaceships were parked. By the time the sun went down, Karval was an altogether human town again.

It was a good-sized human town, too, and one utterly without government of any sort. The Lizards had taken as many of the supplies as they could load into their vehicles. Fights broke out over what was left. Penny managed to get hold of some hard biscuits, and shared them with Rance. They made his belly rumble a little less than it would have without them.