Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

The assembled shiplords didn’t quite burst into cheers, but they came close. Atvar basked in the warm glow of their approval as if he were lying on a sandbank under summer sunshine back on Home.

Heinrich Jager mooched through the streets of Split. In old Yugoslav Army boots, baggy civilian pants, and faded gray Italian Army tunic, he fit in perfectly. Half the men in town wore a mixture of military and civilian garb. Even his craggy features belonged here; he could have been a Croat or a Serb as easily as a German He ambled right past a couple of Lizard patrols. They didn’t turn so much as an eye turret his way.

The tavern across the street from the south wall of Diocletian’s palace had seen better days. It had once had a window in front, but the square of plywood nailed where the window had been was weathered almost gray; it had been up there a long time.

Jager opened the door, slid inside, shut it behind him in a hurry. The fellow behind the bar was about fifty, going gray, with bushy eyebrows that grew together above his bony beak of a nose. Jager hadn’t learned much in the way of Serbo-Croatian, but he had a little Italian. In that language, he said, “Are you Barisha? I hear you’ve got some special brandy in stock.”

The bartender looked him over. “We keep the special stuff in the back room,” he said at last. “You want to come with me?”

“Si grazie,” Jager said. A couple of old men sat at a table in the corner, drinking beer. They didn’t look up when Jager accompanied Barisha into that back room.

The back room was considerably bigger than the one in front; it took up not only the rear of Barisha’s tavern but also the shuttered shops to either side. It needed to be large, for it was packed with poorly shaven men in a motley mixture of clothes. One of the tallest of them grinned at him, his teeth shining in the candlelight. “Thought you’d never get here,” the fellow said in German.

“I’m here, Skorzeny,” Jager answered. “You can take that makeup off your cheek now, if you care to.”

“I was just getting used to going without the scar, too,” the man said. “Come here-I’ve saved one of the Fallschirmjagerwehrs for you.” He held the weapon up over his head.

Jager pushed his way through the crowd. Some of the men carried infantry rifles, others submachine guns. A few, like Skorzeny himself, had paratroop rifles-automatic weapons that fired a full-sized cartridge from a twenty-round box magazine. Jager eagerly took the FG-42 and several full magazines on Skorzeny. “This is as good as anything the Lizards carry,” he said.

“Better than what the Lizards carry,” Skorzeny said. “More powerful cartridge.”

Not inclined to argue the point, Jager said, “When are we going to go down the hole?” He pointed to a black pit that, from the look of it, might have led straight down to hell. It didn’t; it led to the underground galleries inside the wall to Diocletian’s palace.

“Five minutes by my watch after Captain Petrovic and his merry boys start their attack on the palace,” Skorzeny answered. “Five minutes,” he repeated in Italian and Serbo-Croatian. Everybody nodded.

A couple of men came in after Jager. Skorzeny passed them submachine guns. Sneaking the weapons into Split had been harder than getting the men in, but Skorzeny and his local contacts, whoever they were, had managed the job.

A thuttering roar filled the back room, followed by another and another. In Italian, somebody yelled, “Start watching the time,” to Skorzeny.

He shook his big head. “That’s not fighting. That’s just some of the Lizards heading off in helicopters.” He grinned again. “So much the better. That leaves fewer of them for us deal with.”

Even up front with the pilot and weapons officer, the helicopter was noisy. Drefsab didn’t care to think about what it was like for the eight males back in the troop compartment. He waited until all three of his assault aircraft had taken off before he turned to the pilot and said, “On to the ruined castle at Klis. The Deutsche and the Croats there have been plotting against us long enough. This time we bag Skorzeny and all his henchmales.”

“To the castle at Klis,” the pilot repeated, as if he were hearing the order for the first time rather than something like the hundred and first. “It shall be done, superior sir.”

The town of Split shrank as the helicopter gained height. Drefsab found it remarkably ugly: bricks and stucco and red tile roofs were nothing like the concrete and glass and stone of Home. The ruined castle, already growing larger in the distance as the pilot shoved the collective forward, struck him as even uglier.

“Why are you so hot to be rid of this particular Big Ugly, superior sir?” the pilot asked.

“Because he is the biggest nuisance on this entire nuisance of a planet,” Drefsab answered. “He is responsible for more grief to the Race than any other three Big Ugly males I can think of.” He didn’t go into detail; the pilot had no need to know. But his sincerity was so obvious that the pilot turned one eye turret to look at him for a moment before returning full attention to the flight.

The ruined gray stone pile of Klis drew swiftly nearer. Drefsab waited for the Tosevites hiding within to open up with small-arms fire. Satellite and aerial reconnaissance both claimed they had no antiaircraft artillery in there. He hoped the males in recon knew whereof they spoke.

He wished he’d tasted ginger before he got into the helicopter. His body craved it. But he’d restrained himself. Ginger would take away his doubts, and against a foe as wily as Skorzeny he wanted them all in place.

“Shouldn’t they be shooting at us by now?” the weapons officer asked. The castle of Klis seemed very quiet and peaceful, as if no raiders had lived in it for thousands of years. Drefsab hissed softly. Thousands of years ago, the castle probably hadn’t even been built. Tosev 3 was a new world.

He answered the male’s question: “You never can tell with Big Uglies. They may be lying low, hoping to make us think they aren’t really there. Or they may have some sort of ambush set.”

“I’d like to see them try, superior sir,” the weapons officer said. “It’d be a sorry-looking ambush after it bit down on us.”

Drefsab liked his confidence. “Let’s give the place a sandstorm of fire, to make sure we don’t have any trouble getting our males on the ground.”

“It shall be done.” The weapons officer and the pilot spoke together. The pilot called on the radio to his opposite numbers in the other two helicopters. One of them dropped to the ground to unload its soldiers. The other, along with the helicopter in which Drefsab flew, popped up into the air and started pasting the castle of Klis with rockets and machine-gun bullets. No return fire came. As soon as the eight males had scuttled out of the landed helicopter, it rose into the air to join the barrage, while the second one descended to disgorge its soldiers.

Drefsab took a firm grip on his personal weapon. He intended to go down there with the fighting males, and to be certain Skorzeny was dead. There were whole little Tosevite empires that had caused the Race less trouble than that one Deutsch male. Stolen nuclear materials, Mussolini kidnapped to spew propaganda against the Race, a landcruiser lifted out from under everyone’s snout at Besancon, and who could guess how many other crimes lay at his feet.

Males scrambled away from the second helicopter, opening up with their personal weapons to add to the fire that made whatever defenders huddled in Klis keep their heads down. The pilot started to lower Drefsab’s helicopter to let off the males it carried, but before he could grab the collective, the radio speaker taped to his hearing diaphragm began to chatter.