Harry Turtledove - Striking the Balance

Before he could finish the sentence, antiaircraft guns east of Lamar, and then in the town itself, started pounding away. Tracers and shell bursts lit up the night sky, dimming the multitude of stars. Even well outside of Lamar, the din was overwhelming. Shrapnel started pattering down like hot, jagged hail. If that stuff came down on your head, you could end up with a fractured skull. Auerbach wished he were wearing a tin hat. When you took a pretty girl out for a walk, though, you didn’t worry about such things.

He never saw the Lizard warplanes till after they’d bombed and rocketed Lamar, and then only the flames shooting out of their tailpipes. After their run, they stood on their tails and climbed like skyrockets. He counted nine of them, in three flights of three.

“I’ve got to get back,” he said, and started toward Lamar at a trot. Penny came right with him, her shoes at first thumping on dirt and then clunking along the blacktop like his.

The Lizard planes returned to Lamar before the two of them got there. They gave the town another pounding, then streaked off toward the east. The antiaircraft guns kept firing long after they were gone. That was a universal constant of air raids, from everything Auerbach had seen and heard. Another constant was that, even when the guns were blazing away at real live targets, they hardly ever hit them.

Penny was panting and gasping before she and Auerbach got to the outskirts of Lamar, but she gamely stayed with him. He said, “Go on over to the infirmary, why don’t you? They’re sure to need extra hands there.”

“Okay,” she answered, and hurried off. He nodded to her back. Even if she remembered later on that she was supposed to be mad at him, it was better to see her up and doing things than tucked away in her miserable little room with nothing but a Bible for company.

No sooner had she disappeared round a corner than he forgot all about her. He made his way toward the barracks through chaos in the streets. Bucket brigades poured water on the fires the air attack had started. Some of those fires would burn for a long time, and were liable to spread; Lamar depended on wells for its water these days, and well water and buckets weren’t going to be enough to douse the flames.

Wounded men and women cried and screamed. So did wounded horses-at least one bomb had hit the stables. Some of the horses had got out. They were running through the streets, shying from the fires, lashing out in panic with their hooves, and making life more difficult for the people who were trying to help them and help put Lamar back together.

“Captain Auerbach, sir!” somebody bawled, right in Rance’s ear. He jumped and whirled around. His second-in-command, Lieutenant Bill Magruder, stood at his elbow. The firelight showed Magruder’s face covered with so much soot, he might have been in blackface. He said, “Glad to see you’re in one piece, sir.”

“I’m okay,” Auerbach said, nodding. Absurdly, he felt guilty for not having been on the receiving end of the punishment the Lizards had dished out. “What’s the situation here?” That was as discreet a way as he could find of saying he didn’t have the slightest idea what the hell was going on.

“Sir, not to put too fine a point on it, we’ve taken a hell of a licking: men, horses-” He waved at a horse that ran past, its mane smoldering. “The ammo we’ve been stockpiling got hit goddamn hard, too. Those bastards never pounded on Lamar like this before.” He stuck his hands on his hips, as if to say the Lizards had no business pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

Auerbach understood that. Because the aliens didn’t do new things very often, you could get the idea they never did anything new at all. If you did, though, it might be the last mistake you ever made.

Losing the ammunition hurt. “We can forget about tomorrow’s mission, sounds like,” Auerbach said.

“I’m afraid so, Captain.” Magruder grimaced. “Be a while before we can think about it again, too.” His soft Virginia accent made him sound all the more mournful. “Don’t know what’s going on with production, but getting the stuff from one place to another isn’t easy any more.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Auerbach said. He slammed a fist into the side of his thigh. “Damn it. If we could have blown up one of their spaceships, we really would have given them something to think about.”

“I know it, too,” Magruder answered. “Somebody’s got to do it-I agree with you there. Just doesn’t look like it’s going to be us.” He quoted a military maxim: “No plan survives contact with the enemy.”

“And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Auerbach said. “The enemy, that dirty dog, he goes and has plans of his own.” He laughed, even if it hurt. “You just can’t trust the son of a bitch that way.”

“Sure can’t.” Magruder looked around at the wreckage that had been Lamar. “Other thing is, his plan tonight, it worked out fine.”

Lamar was a mess, no two ways about it. “Isn’t that the truth?” Auerbach said again.

The zeks who’d been up at the gulag near Petrozavodsk for a while described the weather as nine months of winter and three of bad skiing. And they were Russians, used to winters far worse than David Nussboym was.

He wondered if the sun ever came out. If the snow ever stopped falling.

Nights were bad. Even with a fire in the stove in the center of the barracks, it stayed bitterly cold. Nussboym was a new fish, a political prisoner as opposed to an ordinary thief, and a Jew to boot. That earned him a top-level bunk far away from the stove and right next to the poorly chinked wall, so that a frigid draft constantly played on his back or his chest. It also earned him the duty of getting up and feeding the stove coal dust in the middle of the night-and earned him a beating if he stayed asleep and let everyone else get as cold as he usually was.

“Shut your mouth, you damned zhid, or you’ll be denied the right to correspondence,” one of the blatnye- the thieves-warned him when he groaned after a kick in the ribs.

“As if I have anyone to write to,” he said later to Ivan Fyodorov, who’d made the trip to the same camp and who, being without connections among the blatnye himself, also had an unenviable bunk site.

Naive as the Russian was, though, he understood camp lingo far better than Nussboym did. “You are a dumb zhid,” he said, without the malice with which the blatnoy had loaded the word. “If you’re deprived of the right to correspond, that means you’re too dead to write to anybody anyhow.”

“Oh,” Nussboym said in a hollow voice. He hugged his ribs and thought about reporting to sick call. Brief consideration was plenty to make him discard that idea. If you tried to report sick and the powers that be weren’t convinced, you got a new beating to go with the one you’d just had. If they were convinced, the borscht and shchi in the infirmary were even thinner and more watery than the horrible slop they fed ordinary zeks. Maybe the theory was that sick men couldn’t digest anything with actual nourishment in it. Whatever the theory. If you weren’t badly sick when you went into the infirmary, odds were you would be by the time you got out-if you got out alive.

He huddled in his clothes under the threadbare blanket and did his best to ignore both the pain in his ribs and the lice that swarmed over him. Everybody had lice. There was no point in getting upset about it-except that it disgusted him. He’d never thought of himself as particularly fastidious, but his standards, he was learning, differed from those of the gulag.

Eventually, he drifted down into a light, uneasy sleep. The horn that announced morning roll call made him jerk as if he’d grabbed hold of an electrflied fence-not that the camp near Petrozavodsk boasted any such luxury, barbed wire being reckoned plenty to contain the likes of him.