Harry Turtledove - Striking the Balance

The only thing Adolf Hitler could do to make Anielewicz happy would be to drop dead, and to do that properly he would have had to manage it before 1939. Nevertheless, he understood what Jager was saying. “If you bypass Lodz to north and south, Colonel, I’ll make sure the Lizards can’t mount a serious attack on you from the city.”

“You’ll make sure?” Jager said. “You can still do so much?”

“I think so,” Anielewicz answered. I hope so. “Colonel, I’m not going to talk about you owing me one.” Of course, by saying he wasn’t going to talk about it, he’d just talked about it. “I will say, though, that I delivered then and I think I can deliver now. Can you?”

“I don’t know,” the German answered. He looked down at the pot of stew, dug out a mess kit and spoon, and ladled some into it. Instead of eating, he passed the little aluminum tub to Mordechai. “Your people fed me then. I can feed you now.” After a moment, he added, “The meat is partridge. We bagged a couple this morning.”

Anielewicz hesitated, then dug in. Meat, kasha or maybe barley, carrots, onions-it stuck to the ribs. When he was done, he gave the mess kit and spoon back to Jager, who cleaned them in the snow and then took his own share.

Between bites, the German said, “I’ll pass on what you’ve told me. I don’t promise anything will come of it, but I’ll do my best. I tell you this, Mordechai: if we do skirt Lodz, you’d better come through on your promise. Show that dealing with you people has a good side to it, show that you deliver, and the people above me are more likely to want to try to do it again.”

“I understand that,” Anielewicz answered. “The same goes back at you, I might add: if you break faith with us after a deal, you won’t like the partisans who show up in your backyard.”

“And I understand that,” Jager said. “Whether my superiors will-” He shrugged. “I told you, I’ll do what I can. My word, at least, is good.” He eyed Anielewicz, as if daring him to deny it. Anielewicz couldn’t, so he nodded. The German let out a long, heavy sigh, then went on, “In the end, whether we go into Lodz or around it won’t matter, anyhow. If we conquer the territory around the city, it will fall to us, too, sooner or later. What happens then?”

He wasn’t wrong. That made it worse, not better. Anielewicz gave him credit: he sounded genuinely worried. Gunther Grillparzer, on the other hand, looked to be just this side of laughing out loud. Let a bunch of Nazi soldiers like him loose in Lodz and the results wouldn’t be pretty.

“What happens then?” Mordechai sighed, too. “I just don’t know.”

Ussmak sat in the base commandant’s office- his office now, even if he still wore the body paint of a landcruiser driver. He’d killed Hisslef, who had led the Race’s garrison at this base in the region of the SSSR known as Siberia. Ussmak wondered if Siberia was the Russki word for deep freeze. He couldn’t tell much difference between the one and the other.

Along with Hisslef, a lot of his chief subordinates were dead, too, hunted down in the frenzy that had gripped the rest of the males after Ussmak fired the first shot. Ginger had had a lot to do with both the shooting and the frenzy that followed it. If Hisslef had just had the sense to let the males gathered in the communal chamber yell themselves out complaining about the war, about Tosev 3, and about this miserable base in particular, he probably still would have been alive. But no, he’d come storming in, intent on stamping this out no matter what… and now his corpse lay stiff and cold-in Siberian winter, very stiff and very cold-outside the barracks, waiting for the weather to warm up enough for a cremation.

“And Hisslef was legitimate commandant, and see what happened to him,” Ussmak muttered. “What will end up happening to me?” He had no millennia of authority to make his orders obeyed almost as if by reflex. Either he had to be obviously right, or else he had to make the males in the base obey him out of fear of what would happen if they didn’t.

His mouth fell open in a bitter laugh. “I might as well be a Big Ugly ruling a not-empire,” he said to the walls. They had to rule by fear; they had no tradition to give them legitimate authority. Now he sympathized with them. He understood in his gut how hard that was.

He opened a drawer in what had been Hisslef’s desk, pulled out a vial of powdered ginger. That was his, by the Emperor (the Emperor against whose officers he’d mutinied, though he tried not to think about that). He yanked off the plastic stopper, poured some of the powder into the palm of his hand, and flicked out his long forked tongue again and again, till the herb was gone.

Exhilaration came quickly, as it always did. In moments after tasting the ginger, Ussmak felt strong, fast, clever, invincible. In the top part of his mind, he knew those feelings, save perhaps for heightened reflexes, were an illusion. When he’d driven the land-cruiser into combat, he’d held off on tasting till he got out again: if you felt invincible when you really weren’t, you’d take chances that were liable to get you killed. He’d seen that happen to other males more times than he cared to recall.

Now, though-“Now I taste all I can, because I don’t want to think about what’s going to happen next,” he said. If the fleetlord wanted to blast this base from the air, Ussmak and his fellow mutineers had no antiaircraft missiles to stop them. He couldn’t surrender to the authorities; he’d put himself beyond the pale when he shot Hisslef, as his followers had with the killings that followed.

He couldn’t hold out indefinitely here, either. The base would run short of both food and hydrogen for fuel-and for heat! — before long. No supplies were coming in. He hadn’t worried about such things when he raised his personal weapon against Hisslef. He’d just worried about making Hisslef shut up.

“That’s the ginger’s fault,” he said querulously-even if his brain was buzzing with it while he complained. “It makes me as shortsighted as a Big Ugly.”

He’d threatened to yield the base and everything in it to the Big Uglies of the SSSR. If it came down to that, he didn’t know whether he could make himself do it. The Russkis made all sorts of glowing promises, but how many would they keep once they had their claws on him? He’d done too much fighting against the Big Uglies to feel easy about trusting them.

Of course. If he didn’t yield the base to the Russkis, they were liable to come take it away from him. They minded cold much less than the Race did. Fear of Soviet raiders had been constant before the mutiny. It was worse now.

“No one wants to do anything hard now,” Ussmak muttered. Going out into the bitter cold to make sure the Russkis didn’t get close enough to mortar the barracks wasn’t duty anyone found pleasant, but if the males didn’t undertake it, they’d end up dead. A lot of them didn’t seem to care. Hisslef had got them out there, but he’d enjoyed legitimate authority. Ussmak didn’t, and felt the lack.

He flicked on the radio that sat on his desk, worked the search buttons to go from station to station. Some of the broadcasts the receivers picked up came from the Race; others, mushy with static, brought him the incomprehensible words of the Big Uglies. He didn’t really want to hear either group, feeling dreadfully isolated from both.

Then, to his surprise, he found what had to be a Tosevite transmission, but one where the broadcaster not only spoke his language but was plainly a male of the Race: no Tosevite was free of accent either annoying or amusing. This fellow was not just one of his own but, by the way he spoke, a male of considerable status: