Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

Pop, pop! A couple of bullets tore through the doped fabric hat covered the U-2’s wings. Ludmila grunted in dismay. The only thing that would protect her was the aircraft’s speed, and the Kukuruznik wasn’t very fast…

Off to one side a couple of kilometers, she glimpsed the fierce tadpole shape of a Lizard helicopter gunship. She heeled he U-2 away from it and dove even closer to the deck. The gunship could fly rings around her and blow her out of the sky, and painful experience had taught that the machine guns she carried wouldn’t do anything more than scratch its paint.

Luck stayed with her: the helicopter continued on up toward he front without spying her. And her turn brought her straight toward a convoy of lorries-some Lizard-made, others captured from the Red Army or the Nazis-also moving up with troops and supplies. She never would have spotted them if she hadn’t had to evade the gunship.

With a joyful whoop, she thumbed the firing button. The Kukuruznik jerked a little as its twin machine guns began to hammer away. Orange lines of tracers showed she was scoring hits. A German-made lorry suddenly became a ball of flame.

Ludmila whooped louder.

Lizards bailed out of vehicles and started shooting at her. She got out of there as fast as she could.

After a good strafing run like that, she could have flown back to her base and truthfully reported success. But, like most good combat pilots, she lusted for more. She buzzed on, deeper into Lizard-held territory.

Back of the line, fire came her way less often. The Lizards seemed less alert, or maybe just hadn’t counted on many human planes getting through. She wished she were flying a Pe-2 bomber with a couple of thousand kilos of high explosive rather than a wheezing trainer that had had a brace of machine guns strapped onto it. But then, the Lizards shot down Pe-2s with effortless ease.

She spied more lorries-human-made ones, stopped to fuel up. She raked them with machine-gun fire, and felt a mix of terror and crazy exhilaration when flames shot so high that she had to pull up sharply, to keep from flying straight through them.

The machine guns had performed without a jam. They usually did, so she didn’t know how much Georg Schultz’s relentless perfectionism had to do with that, but it couldn’t have hurt. She swung the U-2 back toward the north; she was low on fuel and she’d used a lot of ammunition. She was willing to bet Schultz had spent the time she was flying methodically filling belts with bullets.

Coming back, she was fired on not only by the Lizards but also by jittery Soviet troops convinced anything in the air, especially if it flew over them from the other side of the line, had to be dangerous. But the Kukuruznik, not least because it was so simple, was a rugged machine: unless you hit the engine or the pilot or were lucky enough to snap a control wire with a bullet, you wouldn’t hurt it much.

Ludmila flew over advancing Lizard tanks. They were across a small river whose line the Soviets had been holding when she’d gone out on her attack run an hour or so before. She bit her lip. It was as she’d feared: in spite of everything the Red Army could do, in spite of her own pinprick successes inside Lizard-held territory, the local position was deteriorating. Sukhinichi would fall, and after that only Kaluga stood between the Lizards and Moscow.

The U-2 bounced to a stop. A couple of groundcrew men lugged jerricans of petrol toward the airplane, squelching through mud that was still pretty thick. Behind them came Georg Schultz, ammunition belts draped across his chest so that he resembled nothing so much as a Cossack bandit. He took a chunk of black bread from a pocket of the German infantry blouse he still wore, held it out to Ludmila. “Khleb,” he said, one Russian word he’d mastered.

“Spasebo,” she answered, and took a bite. Right in back of Schultz slogged Nikifor Sholudenko. Maybe he didn’t want the German spending even a moment alone with her because they were rivals, or maybe just because he was NKVD. Either way, Ludmila was glad to see him: he was someone to whom she could report, which meant she wouldn’t have to hunt up Colonel Karpov.

Or could she? The air base looked like an anthill somebody had kicked, with people running every which way to no apparent purpose. Before she could ask any questions, Schultz spread his arms wide and exclaimed, “Bolshoye drap -big skedaddle.” That was, ironically, the same term the Russians had used to describe the flight of bureaucrats from Moscow when it looked as if the Germans would capture the capital in October 1941. Ludmila wondered if Schultz was using it with malice aforethought.

That, however, mattered relatively little. “Skedaddle?” Ludmila said in dismay. “We’re puffing out of here?”

“We are indeed,” Nikifor Sholudenko said. “Orders are to shorten, consolidate, and strengthen the defensive front.” He didn’t bother to add that that was a euphemism for retreat, just as severe fighting meant a battle we’re losing. Ludmila knew that as well as he did. So, very likely, did Georg Schultz.

Ludmila said, “May I fly another mission before we pull back? I stung them the last time; they hardly had any air defenses set up.”

“Who can defend against one of these things?” Schultz said in German, setting an affectionate hand on the U-2’s cloth-covered fuselage. “They peep in through the keyhole when you’re taking a leak.”

Sholudenko snorted at that, but to Ludmila he shook his head. “Colonel Karpov’s orders are that we leave now. They came in just after you took off; if you hadn’t been airborne, we probably would have already cleared out.”

“Where are we going?” Ludmila asked.

The NKVD man pulled out a scrap of paper, glanced down at it. “They’re setting up a new base at Collective Farm 139, bearing 43, distance fifty-two kilometers.”

Ludmila translated distance and bearing into a dot on the map. “That’s right outside Kaluga,” she said unhappily.

“Just west of it, as a matter of fact,” Sholudenko agreed. “We’re going to fight the Lizards house by house and street by street in Sukhinichi to delay them while we prepare new positions between Sukhinichi and Kaluga. Then, at need, we will fight house by house in Kaluga. I hope the need does not arise.”

He stopped there; not even an NKVD man, answerable to no one at the air base but himself and perhaps, for something particularly heinous, Colonel Karpov, wanted to say too much. But Ludmila had no trouble reading between the lines. He didn’t expect whatever makeshift line the Red Army would set up north of Sukhinichi to hold the Lizards. He didn’t expect to hold them at Kaluga, either, not by the sound of what he said. And between Kaluga and Moscow lay only plains and forest-no more cities in- which to slow down and maul the invaders.

“We’re in trouble,” Georg Schultz said in German. Ludmila wondered at his naivete in speaking so freely: the Nazis might not have the NKVD, but they certainly did have the Gestapo. Didn’t Schultz know you weren’t supposed to open your mouth where people you couldn’t trust were listening?

Sholudenko gave him an odd look. “The Soviet Union is in trouble,” he conceded. “No more so than Germany, however, and no more so than any of the rest of the world.”

Before Schultz could answer, Colonel Karpov came running up the airstrip, shouting, “Get out! Get out! Lizard armor has broken through west of Sukhinichi, and they’re heading this way. We have maybe an hour to get clear-maybe not, too. Get out!”

Wearily, Ludmila climbed back into the little Kukuruznik Groundcrew men turned the plane into the wind; Georg Schultz spun the two-bladed wooden prop. The engine, reliable even if puny, caught at once. The biplane rattled down the runway and hopped into the air. Ludmila swung it northeast, toward Collective Farm 139.