Harry Turtledove - Upsetting the Balance

The German panzers deployed for action, moving into their blunt wedge formation: two companies forward, Jager’s command panzer and another company in the middle to support them, and a fourth company in the rear as a reserve. They chewed brown, muddy lines through the green of growing crops.

Without warning, a streak of fire lanced through the air toward a Panzer IV in one of the lead companies. New Panzer IVs had long-barreled 75mm guns almost as good as the ones Panthers carried, but their armor, though thicker than in the earlier models, wasn’t excellent protection even against terrestrial foes. Against a Lizard anti-panzer rocket, the armor might as well not have been there at all. The Panzer IV brewed up, orange flame billowing and a column of thick black smoke mounting swiftly into the air.

Confused, angry shouts filled the radio. Jager grabbed the headset, shoved the earphones into place, and shouted orders into the microphone. The nearest surviving panzer poured machine-gun fire into the thick clump of bushes from which the anti-panzer rocket had come, hoping to flush out or knock down the Lizards who had fired it.

Nothing without armor could have survived that hail of bullets. From more than four hundred meters farther to the rear, Jager watched the bushes writhe under it, as if under torture. But a moment later, another rocket incinerated a German panzer.

“They’ve got one of their troop carriers in there!” Jager shouted into the microphone. “Give ’em your main armament.” Unlike German half-tracks, the Lizards’ armored troop carriers bore light cannon that could chew up anything this side of a panzer, and carried those rockets on turret rails to either side of the cannon. With them, the troop carriers became deadly dangerous panzer killers.

But, while they were formidably armed, they were only lightly armored. They could withstand small-arms fire, but when a panzer shell came knocking, they opened up. The German panzer hit the brakes to fire into that stand of bushes. Moments later, the bushes went up in flames as part of the troop carrier’s funeral pyre.

Jager whooped like a Red Indian. He remembered all too well the bad days of the summer before, when killing any Lizard armored vehicle seemed to require divine intervention. He’d done it himself once, with the 50mm cannon of a Panzer III, but he didn’t pretend he’d been anything but lucky.

Yet another rocket streaked out from cover and smote a Panzer IV. The rocket exploded in a ball of flame, but the panzer did not brew up. Jager whooped again. “The Schurzen work!” he shouted to the world at large. The hollow-charge warheads of the Lizards’ anti-panzer rockets sent a jet of white-hot flame through armor and into a panzer. Some bright engineer had figured out that 5mm plates-“skirts,” he called them-welded onto a panzer’s turret and sides would make the rocket warhead go off prematurely and dissipate that jet. Now Jager saw that the bright idea actually worked in combat.

The advancing German panzers kept on spraying the Lizard infantry positions with machine-gun bullets. Covered by that, German infantrymen ran forward, too. The only opposing fire came from small arms. Jager’s hopes rose, if the Lizards didn’t have any panzers in this sector, the Wehrmacht really could make some gains. He hadn’t taken the brass seriously when they talked about getting Mulhouse back and cutting the Lizards off from the Rhine, but he was starting to think that just might happen.

Then three Lizard helicopters popped up from behind cover, two from out of clearings in the woods and the third from behind a barn. Jager’s mouth went dry; helicopters were deadlier foes than panzers. They launched two rockets each. One blew a hole in the ground. The other five hit German panzers. Two of the machines survived, but the other three went up in flames. A couple of crewmen managed to bail out of escape hatches; most perished.

Then 20mm rapid-fire antiaircraft guns started hammering at the helicopters. On the raid that captured the plutonium from the Lizards, the Germans who’d joined with the Russian partisans had carried a mountain version of one of those guns, which broke down into man-portable loads. Now the Wehrmacht made a habit of posting the light guns as far forward as possible, to hold helicopters at bay.

The tactic worked. The helicopters sheered away from the antiaircraft guns. One of them was trailing smoke, though it kept flying. Jager prayed for it to fall from the sky, but it refused.

The two lead panzer companies were already through what had been the Lizards’ front line. They hadn’t cleared up all the holdouts; a bullet cracked past Jager’s head and several more ricocheted off the Panther. Like any sensible soldiers, the Lizards were trying to pick off the panzer commanders. For the time being, Jager ducked down into the Panther turret.

“We’re driving them,” he said, fixing his eyes to the periscopes that gave him vision even when buttoned up. “With luck, maybe we can push far enough to get in among their artillery and do them some real harm.”

Just then a Lizard troop carrier that had lain low opened up with a rocket and took out a panzer less than a hundred meters from Jager’s. By luck, he was looking through the periscope that showed where the rocket had come from. “Panzer halt!” he shouted, and then, “Armor-piercing!”

“Armor-piercing.” Wolfgang Eschenbach had a dispensation to exceed his daily word quota if in the line of duty. Grunting a little, he lifted a black-tipped shell and set it in the breech of the Panther’s cannon.

“Bearing three hundred degrees, range seven hundred meters, maybe a little less,” Jager said.

The turret slewed anticlockwise. “I see him, sir,” Klaus Meinecke said. “Behind those bushes, ja ?”

“That’s the one,” Jager said. “Fire at-”

Before he could say “will,” Meinecke fired. With the turret closed, the noise was bearable, but recoil rocked the Panther. The shell casing leaped out of the breech; Eschenbach had to move smartly to keep it from mashing his toes. The acrid reek of burnt cordite filled the air.

“Hit!” Jager yelled. “Hit! Got him in one, Klaus. Forward!” That to the driver; stopped, the Panther was hideously vulnerable to enemy fire. The Maybach bellowed. The panzer leaped ahead. The advance went on.

Captain Rance Auerbach led his cavalry company out of Syracuse, Kansas, heading east along the north bank of the Arkansas River toward Garden City. Somewhere before he got there, he expected to run into the Lizards.

People in Syracuse waved to him and his command. Like him, they were up with the sun. Most of them were heading out to their farms. “God bless you, boys,” a man in overalls called. “Give ’em hell,” somebody else said. Two people said, “Be careful.”

“We’ll do our best,” Auerbach said, brushing the brim of his hat with the forefinger of his right hand. He was a big, rawboned man; years out in the open in all weather had tanned and lined his long face till he looked a good deal older than his actual thirty-two. That was true of most of the farmers, too, but amid their flat Kansas accents his Texas drawl stood out like a bobcat in a pack of coyotes.

His second-in-command, Lieutenant Bill Magruder, came out of Virginia and had a softer version of a Southern accent. “So’t of hate to leave a nice little town like this,” he remarked.

“It is pretty, isn’t it?” Auerbach said. Syracuse boasted a cool, green profusion of poplars, willows, and other trees. On this stretch of the Great Plains, there wasn’t much like it. Folks drove from miles around to relax under those trees. Or rather, folks had driven, in the days before the Lizards came.