Harry Turtledove - Fallout

The Ivans didn’t have the advantage of surprise any more, though. Gustav huddled in his hole, waiting for the rockets to stop. If they didn’t kill him, he’d have to fight them. They didn’t. He did. He rapidly developed a deep affection for the Soviet assault rifle he’d killed to acquire. It beat the snot out of the PPSh.

But there were too many Russians, too many tanks. He thought he’d fallen back to the black days of 1945, when there were always too many tanks and too many Russians. He scrambled out of the foxhole to join the retreat. It was that or die.

He saw his mess tin, lying on the pavement. A fragment from a Katyusha had torn it almost in half. One more war casualty, he thought. He trotted northwest, toward the new defensive line the Germans and Amis were trying to set up.

–

“Give them the machine gun, Juris!” Konstantin Morozov shouted.

“I’m doing it, Comrade Sergeant,” Juris Eigims replied. The gunner used the weapon coaxial with the T-54’s cannon to spray the luckless enemy soldiers-Englishmen, Konstantin thought they were from the shape of their helmets-who had the bad luck to show themselves just as the tank chugged out from behind a burnt-out church.

Some of the Tommies fell over. Some ran back to the stone fence that had protected them till they came out from behind it. Others made pickup on their wounded and dead mates. The machine gun bit some of those guys, too. It didn’t care that they were brave and wanted to save their comrades. It only cared that they were there, where it could reach them.

Morozov said, “Why don’t you hit that fence with a round or two of HE? Then send in another one and smash whatever’s right in back of it.”

“Right, Comrade Sergeant.” Eigims barked an order to Vazgen Sarkisyan. The loader slammed a 100mm shell into the breech and banged it closed. The Baltic gunner fired. Inside the turret, the roar wasn’t too bad. Had he been out in the open air, Konstantin would have thought it took his head off.

Hit by fifteen kilos of speeding metal and high explosives, several meters of the stone fence abruptly ceased to be. So did a good many enemy soldiers behind those meters. The blasted bits of stone made more murderous shrapnel than anything the most fiendish shell-builder would pack into a casing.

“Want me to hit the wall again, Comrade Sergeant? We got good results from that last round.” Eigims did understand that killing enemy troops was his own best chance of staying alive. While they were in action, he didn’t go out of his way to undercut the tank commander.

Coughing on propellant fumes, Morozov nodded. “ Da. Say, fifteen or twenty meters to the left of the last one.”

“Got you.” As Sarkisyan loaded another HE shell into the gun, Eigims traversed the turret. The cannon bellowed again. Another stretch of stone fence turned to deadly fragments. Another swath of Englishmen huddling behind it turned to sausage meat.

“Good shot!” Morozov said. “Now one more, through a gap.”

“You want it to burst just behind there?” the gunner asked.

“That’s right. That’s just right!” Konstantin reached down and thumped Eigims on the shoulder, a liberty he hadn’t taken till now. “Now we’ll do for the ones the first two rounds only scared.”

“Khorosho.” Juris Eigims ordered another HE shell from the loader. As soon as Sarkisyan manhandled it into place and closed the breech, the gunner fired. The cartridge case clanged on the floor of the fighting compartment. The shell burst sent bodies cartwheeling through the air, high enough so Morozov could see them above the top of the battered stone fence. Eigims glanced up at him. “Shall I send one more?”

Not without regret, Konstantin shook his head. “I don’t want to get greedy. We stay out here in the open too long, they’ll give it to us.” He spoke over the intercom to Vladislav Kalyakin, who sat all alone at the front of the T-54’s hull: “Back us up behind the church again, Vladislav. Some people who don’t like us very much will start throwing things at us in a minute.”

“You’ve got it, Comrade Sergeant.” Gears ground as the driver put the tank into reverse. The T-54’s transmission wasn’t what anybody would call smooth. But it beat hell out of the T-34’s. In the older tank, the driver always kept a heavy mallet where he could grab it in a hurry when he needed to persuade the beast to engage the top gear.

The Americans in their fancy Pershings would laugh at that. During the Great Patriotic War, Germans in their fancy Tigers and Panthers would have laughed, too…for a while. Then the front stopped moving east and rolled west, west, inexorably west, all the way to Berlin. After a while, the fucking Fritzes started laughing out of the other side of their mouths.

Now the front was rolling west again. Pretty soon, the Americans-and the English, and the French, and the Nazi retreads who fought alongside them-would be laughing out of the other side of their mouths, too.

Juris Eigims tapped Konstantin on the leg of his coveralls. When the tank commander glanced down, Eigims said, “You know what you’re doing, hey, Comrade Sergeant?”

From him, Morozov would never get higher praise. Konstantin knew it, but tried not to make too much of it. “Well, maybe a little bit,” he answered. “It’s not like I’m a virgin inside a tank, you know.”

“Captain Lapshin said that, yeah,” the gunner replied. “But some people, you put ’em in charge of something and they start thinking they’re little tin gods. You aren’t like that.”

By some people, he was bound to mean some Russians or perhaps lots of Russians . He wasn’t even wrong, as Morozov knew too well. Some Russians, perhaps lots of Russians, were like that. No doubt some Latvians and Lithuanians were, too. But in a world where there were swarms of Russians and a handful of Balts, the Latvians and Lithuanians rarely got the chance to show it off.

“Look, all I want to do is get through this mess in one piece,” Konstantin said. “We’ve got to fight. Nobody says we’ve got to be stupid while we do it.” He paused to light a papiros and suck in smoke. Then he asked, “How’s that sound to you?”

“I’ve heard things I liked worse.” Eigims paused, too, weighing his words. “As long as you’re like this, it doesn’t matter so much that I didn’t get the tank.”

The cigarette gave Konstantin the excuse to waste another few seconds before he replied, “You can swing one. You know what to do. If we stay alive, you’ll get your chance.”

“Maybe. Or maybe not. I’m not what you’d call a socially reliable element.” Eigims didn’t bother hiding his bitterness.

“In a war, being able to do the job counts for more,” Konstantin said.

“Easy for you to tell me that. You’re a Russian.”

“I’ve been in the army since halfway through the Great Patriotic War. I’m a sergeant. By the time they make me a lieutenant, I’ll be dead of old age.” Morozov had no great hankering to wear an officer’s shoulder boards. But that was beside the point he was trying to make.

Eigims grunted. Konstantin let it alone, but he was confident he had it right. If you could do the job and they didn’t blow you up, you would make sergeant and command a tank. Russian? Karelian? Armenian? Lithuanian? Uzbek? Chukchi from the far reaches of Siberia? He’d seen sergeants from all those peoples, and more besides, in the armored divisions that smashed the Hitlerites. They were still in the Red Army, too.

It wasn’t quite the same when you talked about officers. Then Slavs and Armenians and Georgians (Stalin was one, after all) had an edge on the other tribes, mostly because they’d shown themselves to be more trustworthy.