Harry Turtledove: Tilting the Balance

“They’ve been here,” a male said, pointing to the litter scattered wherever it wasn’t visible from Split. “Why aren’t they here now?” He sounded indignant; to the Race, the world by rights should have been a neatly predictable place.

“They may have timed their attack in town to match ours here,” Drefsab answered. “Their intelligence is revoltingly good.” That didn’t surprise him overmuch; only natural for beings of one kind to stick together against those of another, especially when the latter were trying to conquer them.

He badly wanted a taste of ginger. He’d all but promised the fleetlord that he’d bring back Skorzeny’s head in a clear block of acrylic resin. Would Atvar be content if presented with a mere strategic gain rather than said head? Unless Skorzeny got himself killed and identified back in Split, it looked as if Drefsab would have to find out. Ginger wouldn’t change that, but would keep him from having to think about it for a while.

Another male waved to him from a stone-lined hole in the ground. “Over here, superior sir,” he said. “Looks like the Big Uglies that haunted this place made their home underground.”

Drefsab shone an electric torch into the hole. Even without it, he would have been sure this was a Big Ugly den: the Tosevites’ rank, meaty smell filled the scent receptors on his tongue. He played the torch back and forth, then let out a low hiss. “This place will hold a lot of Big Uglies.”

“That’s true, superior sir,” the male agreed. “Where do you suppose they’ve all gone?”

“Some of them back to their villages, I suppose, and some into town to attack our walls,” Drefsab answered. He stuck out his tongue. The words did not taste right. From all he’d learned of Skorzeny, such a simpleminded frontal assault seemed out of character.

“If you want us to set up camp in this pile of stones, superior sir I hope you don’t expect us to use that place down there.” The soldier also stuck out his tongue, and waggled it in derision and disgust. “It stinks.”

“That it does,” Drefsab said. “And no, I promise you won’t have to set up your sleeping gear down there-not until we fumigate, anyhow.” His mouth and the other male’s dropped open in a laugh.

The speaker built into his helmet suddenly screamed at him: “Superior sir! Superior sir! We’re under attack not just from outside the wall but also from within! Somehow a large party of Big Uglies managed to get inside the walls without being noticed. We’re taking heavy casualties. Need for assistance urgent in the extreme!”

Drefsab made a noise like a pressure cooker forgotten on top of a hot stove. “None of them slipped away to their villages,” he said when coherent speech returned. The male beside him stared in confusion; he hadn’t heard the desperate call. Drefsab went on, “They all went down into Split.” No, Skorzeny wasn’t simpleminded at all.

“Who? The Big Uglies?” the male asked, still trying to figure out what was going on.

Drefsab ignored him. He waved to the soldiers scattered over the castle of Klis. “Back to the helicopters!” he shouted.

“Quick as you can!”

A virtue of the Race was obedience to superiors. The males neither hesitated nor asked questions. They ran toward the helicopters as fast as their legs would take them. Behind the armor-glass windscreens, the pilots waved frantically. They’d got, the message, too, then.

Drefsab dashed up to the cockpit. “To the fortress!” he snarled. “Skorzeny will pay for this. Oh, how he will pay.”

All the pilot said was, “It shall be done.” He pulled up on the collective. The helicopter sprang into the air. It wheeled within its own diameter and darted back toward Split. Only then did the pilot say, “May I ask your plan, superior sir?”

“Use our firepower to blast the Big Uglies out of the fortress,” Drefsab answered. “They may have smuggled in men and rifles; I refuse to believe they could carry antiaircraft weapons into Split without our noticing.”

“No doubt you are right about that, superior sir,” the weapons officer said with all proper deference. “But I see I must remind you that we expended most of our munitions in the bombardment of that empty castle. We have little left to use back at the city.”

Drefsab stared at him in blank dismay. After a moment, he said, “Keep going anyhow. I’ll think of something.” The ground blurred by under the helicopter. He didn’t have much time.

Jager had fought house to house, street to street, in towns and cities in the Ukraine. He’d hated it then. Even with a panzer wrapped around him, it was deadly dangerous work. Doing it in nothing but these ragged clothes struck him as clinically insane. “You’d never get me to join the infantry now,” he muttered, sheltered in the doorway of a building near the wall. “I did that the last war.”

Bullets sprayed past him, biting chips out of stone and brickwork. They stung when they hit; if you got one in the eye, it could blind you. The Lizards all had automatic weapons and, by the way they hosed fire around, they might have had all the ammunition in the world, too. Jager was too aware that he didn’t. The FG-42 was a wonderful weapon, but it went through magazines in a hurry.

Several men in front of him shot back at the Lizards. That was the signal for him and half a dozen fellows with him to leapfrog forward past them. Leaving the doorway was as hard as getting out of a trench and springing across no-man’s-land had been in France a generation ago. But fire and move was how you fought as a foot soldier if you wanted any kind of chance of living to do it again.

He bounded along the cobblestones, bent over as if his belly griped him to make himself as small a target for the Lizards as he could. The men firing hadn’t suppressed all the enemies ahead. Bullets struck sparks from the cobbles close by his feet and ricocheted away at crazy angles.

He’d had a new doorway in mind when he started his dash. He threw himself into it, panting as if he’d just run a marathon rather than a few meters. A moment later, another fellow squeezed in behind him. In Slavic-accented German, he asked, “Think any of the things are inside here?”

Jager made a sour face. “We’re getting up close to their position. It could be.”

“I have grenade,” the Croat said, pulling a German potato-masher model from his belt. He tried a thick wooden door. The knob turned in his hand. That was plenty to make Jager suspicious, and the Croat as well. He unscrewed the grenade’s protective cap, yanked the igniter, opened the door, chucked in the grenade, and slammed it again.

The blast made Jager’s head pound. Fragments rattled off the door. Jager flung it open once more, sprayed a quick burst into the chamber to catch any Lizards the grenade had missed Then he dove behind a massive oaken desk that had probably sat there since the days of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

The Croat ran to the next door in, fired a few rounds from his submachine gun, then peered around the corner. That was the right order in which to do things. He grunted. “I think we maybe are lucky.”

“Better for us to shoot up the place and not need to than to need to and not do it,” Jager said. The Croat nodded. Taking no chances even so, Jager crawled back to the outer doorway. Just as he got there, a blast like a 500-kilo bomb went off to the north. When he ever so cautiously looked out of the doorway, he saw a great hole in the outwall to Diocletian’s palace. The antiquarian in him lamented. The soldier rejoiced-Skorzeny’s raiders had distracted the Lizards enough to let Petrovic’s men lay the explosives next to the wall.

He sprang to his feet, stormed forward. The best time to advance was while the enemy was momentarily stunned. Now the Lizards would have a doubly hard time: they’d have to fight Skorzeny’s men and keep Petrovic’s followers from. getting through the breach in the wall. This mad raid just might work.