Harry Turtledove - Striking the Balance

Healthy men drank first, then the ones with tubercular coughs, and last of all the three or four luckless fellows who had syphilis. Nussboym wondered if the arrangement did any good, because he doubted the NKVD men washed the mugs between uses. The water was yellowish and cloudy and tasted of grease. The guard had taken it from the engine tender instead of going to some proper spigot. All the same, it was wet. He drank his allotted mug, ate the herring, and felt, for a moment, almost like a human being instead of a zek.

Georg Schultz spun the U-2’s two-bladed wooden prop. The five-cylinder Shvetsov radial caught almost at once; in a Russian winter, an air-cooled engine was a big advantage. Ludmila Gorbunova had heard stories about Luftwaffe pilots who had to light fires on the ground under the nose of their aircraft to keep their antifreeze from freezing up.

Ludmila checked the rudimentary collection of dials on the Kukuruznik’s instrument panel. All in all, they told her nothing she didn’t already know: the Wheatcutter had plenty of fuel for the mission she was going to fly, the compass did a satisfactory job of pointing toward north, and the altimeter said she was still on the ground.

She released the brake. The little biplane bounced across the snowy field that served as an airstrip. Behind her, she knew, men and women with brooms would sweep snow over the tracks her wheels made. The Red Air Force took maskirovka seriously.

After one last jounce, the U-2 didn’t come down. Ludmila patted the side of the fuselage with a gloved but affectionate hand. Though designed as a primary trainer, the aircraft had harassed first the Germans and then the Lizards. Kukuruznik’s flew low and slow and, but for the engine, had almost no metal; they evaded the Lizards’ detection systems that let the alien imperialist aggressors hack more sophisticated warplanes out of the sky with ease. Machine guns and light bombs weren’t much, but they were better than nothing.

Ludmila swung the aircraft into a long, slow turn back toward the field from which she’d taken off. Georg Schultz still stood out there. He waved to her and blew her a kiss before he started trudging for the pine woods not far away.

“If Tatiana saw you doing that, she’d blast your head off from eight hundred meters,” Ludmila said. The slipstream that blasted over the windscreen into the open cockpit blew her words away. She wished something would do the same for Georg Schultz. The German panzer gunner made a first-rate mechanic; he had a feel for engines, the way some people had a feel for horses. That made him valuable no matter how loud and sincere a Nazi he was.

Since the Soviet Union and the Hitlerites were at least formally cooperating against the Lizards, his fascism could be overlooked, as fascism had been overlooked till the Nazis treacherously broke their nonaggression pact with the USSR on 22 June 1941. What Ludmila couldn’t stomach was that he kept trying to get her to go to bed with him, though she had about as much interest in sleeping with him as she did with, say, Heinrich Himmler.

“You’d think he would have left me alone after he and Tatiana started jumping on each other,” Ludmila said to the cloudy sky. Tatiana Pirogova was an accomplished sniper who’d shot at Nazis before she started shooting at Lizards. She was at least as deadly as Schultz, maybe deadlier. As far as Ludmila could see, that was what drew them together.

“Men,” she added, a complete sentence. Despite enjoying Tatiana’s favors, Schultz still kept trying to lay her, too. Under her breath, she muttered, “Damned nuisance.”

She buzzed west across Pskov. Soldiers in the streets, some in Russian khaki, others in German field-gray, still others in winter white that made their nationality impossible to guess, waved at her as she flew by. She didn’t mind that at all. Sometimes, though, human troops would fire at her in the air, on the assumption that anything airborne had to belong to the Lizards.

A train pulled out of the station, heading northwest. The exhaust from the locomotive was a great black plume that would have been visible for kilometers against the snow had the low ceiling not masked it. The Lizards liked shooting up trains whenever they got the chance.

She waved to the train when she came closest to it She didn’t think anyone on board saw it, but she didn’t care. Trains pulling out of Pskov were a hopeful sign. During the winter, the Red Army- and the Germans, Ludmila thought reluctantly-had pushed the Lizards back from the city, and back from the railroad lines that ran through it. These days, you could. If you were lucky, get through to Riga by train.

But you still needed luck, and you still needed time. That was why Lieutenant General Chill had sent his despatch with her-not only did it have a better chance of getting through, it would reach his Nazi counterpart in the Latvian capital well before it could have got there by rail.

Ludmila skinned back her teeth in a sardonic grin. “Oh, how the mighty Nazi general wished he could have sent a mighty Nazi flier to carry his message for him,” she said. “But he didn’t have any mighty Nazi fliers, so he was stuck with me.” The expression on Chill’s face had been that of a man biting into an unripe apple.

She patted the pocket of her fur-lined leather flying suit in which the precious despatch rested. She didn’t know what it said. By the way Chill had given it to her, that was a privilege she didn’t deserve. She laughed a little. As if he could have stopped her from opening the envelope and reading what was inside! Maybe he thought she wouldn’t think of that. If he did, he was stupid even for a German.

Perverse pride, though, had made her keep the envelope sealed. General Chill was-formally-an ally, and had entrusted her with the message, no matter how reluctant he was about it. She would observe the proprieties in return.

The Kukuruznik buzzed along toward Riga. The countryside over which it skimmed was nothing like the steppe that surrounded Kiev, where Ludmila had grown up. Instead of endless empty kilometers, she flew above snow-dappled pine woods, part of the great forest that stretched east to Pskov and far, far beyond. Here and there, farms and villages appeared in the midst of the forest. At first, the human settlements in the middle of the wilderness almost startled Ludmila. As she flew on toward the Baltic, they grew ever more frequent.

Their look changed about halfway to Riga, when she crossed from Russia into Latvia. It wasn’t just that the buildings changed, though plaster walls and tile roofs took the place of wood and sometimes thatch. Things became more orderly, too, and more conservative of space: all the land was used for some clearly defined purpose-cropland, town, woodlot, or whatever it might have been. Everything plainly was being exploited, not lying around waiting in case some use eventually developed for it.

“It might as well be Germany,” Ludmila said aloud. The thought gave her pause. Latvia had only been reincorporated into the Soviet Union a little more than a year before the Hitlerites treacherously invaded the rodina. Reactionary elements there had welcomed the Nazis as liberators, and collaborated with them against Soviet forces. Reactionary elements in the Ukraine had done the same thing, but Ludmila tried not to think about that.

She wondered what sort of reception she’d get in Riga. Pskov had had Soviet partisans lurking in the nearby forests, and was now essentially a codominion between German and Soviet forces. She didn’t think any signflicant Soviet forces operated anywhere near Latvia-farther south, maybe, but not by the Baltic.

“So,” she said, “there soon will be a signflicant Soviet force in Latvia: me.” The slipstream blew away the joke, and the humor from it.