Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

The NKVD man and the ex- Wehrmacht sergeant both sprang toward the front of the Kukuruznik Schultz got there first. When he yanked at the prop, Sholudenko had to back way; walking into a spinning prop blade would kill you as surely as a pistol, and a lot more messily.

Buzz! The prop caught; the five-cylinder radial engine spat out acrid exhaust fumes. Ludmila released the brake. The U-2 bounded over the rough airstrip (not really a strip at all, just a stretch of field), picking up speed. Ludmila gave it more throttle, eased the stick back. The ugly little biplane clawed its way into the air.

Even in flight, the U-2 did not go from duckling to swan. Yet, as a mosquito will bite and escape where a horsefly gets noticed and swatted, Kukuruzniks came back from missions more often than any other Soviet planes.

Not much was left of Kaluga. “Ludmila flew over the outskirts of the industrial town. The Germans had wrecked part of when they took it in their drive on Moscow in fall 1941, and the Russians had wrecked more when they took it back later the same year. Whatever they’d left standing, the Lizards had knocked down over the last couple of weeks.

The front lay north of Kaluga these days. The Lizards had cleared a few of the north-south streets through the town so they could move supplies forward. Lorries, some of their manufacture, others captured from the Nazis or the Soviets (some of those Russian-made, others American) rolled along, as if no enemies were to be found for a thousand kilometers.

I may not be much of an enemy, but I’m the best the Soviet Union has here, Ludmila thought. She worked her flaps and rudder, heeled the U-2 over into an attack run on the lorry column she’d spotted.

No one in the column spotted her until she was close enough to open fire. “The mosquito stings!” she hollered, and whooped with glee as Lizards bailed out of the lorries and dove for cover.

Some of them didn’t bail out-some shot back. Bullets snarled past the U-2. Ludmila kept boring in. She pulled the bomb-release handle. The aircraft suddenly got lighter and more maneuverable as weight and drag fell away.

She gunned it for every ruble it was worth, although, with the Kukuruznik, such things were better measured in kopecks. The biplane shook slightly as the bombs exploded behind it. Ludmila looked back over her shoulder. Some of the lorries were burning merrily. Between them and the little bomb craters she’d made, the Lizards wouldn’t be moving much forward on that route for a while.

Pity the U-2 could carry only light bombs. “I don’t just want to block off one road for a while,” Ludmila said, as if a witch might hear and grant her wish. “I want to keep the Lizards from using the whole city.”

What she wanted and what she could do, sadly, were not one and the same. She flew over Kaluga at rooftop height-not that many of the gutted houses and factories still had roofs-shooting at whatever targets she saw. None was as good as that first line of lorries.

The Lizards shot back. After a while, they started shooting the instant she came into range, sometimes before she opened up herself, Time to go, she thought. The Lizards used many more radios than the Red Army did; they must have spread the word that she was buzzing around.

She got out of Kaluga as fast as she could, ducking down between ruined buildings to make herself as nearly unhittable as she could. It must have worked; she escaped with no more damage than a few bullet holes through the fabric covering of the U-2’s wings and fuselage.

She flew off toward the west; the Lizards had to know the air base lay in that direction, and flying into the afternoon sun made her a harder target for gunners in Kaluga. But she zigzagged around a half-burned grove of plum trees and then headed east and north toward the front. With not much standing between the Lizards and Moscow, she had to do all she could, however little that was, to stem the tide of their advance.

Wreckage littered the ground north of Kaluga, the all-too-familiar signs of a Soviet army in disintegration: shattered tanks and armored cars, trench lines reduced to craters by artillery, unburied corpses in khaki. Even zooming by at full throttle, she gagged at the stink of death and decay that filled her nostrils.

Far less Lizard wreckage was strewn about. The Lizards made a point of salvaging their damaged equipment, which accounted for some of the disparity. But most of it sprang from their losing a lot less than their opponents had. That had been a constant of the war since its earliest days.

Artillery boomed and flashed, off toward the east. The Lizards’ guns outranged those of the Red Army, too; from north of Kaluga, they could all but reach Moscow. Ludmila flew toward the guns. If she could shoot up the crews, that would be a good part of a day’s work.

Though retreating, the Red Army hadn’t given up the fight. She heard screams in the air; a ragged pattern of explosions tore up a square kilometer of ground not far ahead of the Kukuruznik “Katyushas!” she cried in high glee. The rockets were some of the best weapons the Soviets had. Unlike more conventional artillery, they were easily portable, and a flight of them not only did a lot of damage but also spread terror.

Some Lizards were just emerging from their hidey-holes after the Katyusha salvo when Ludmila flew by. She opened up with her machine gun. The Lizards dove back into cover. She hoped some of them weren’t fast enough to reach it, but was gone before she could be sure.

As she approached the Lizards’ artillery position, she got down below treetop height. Some of those gun stations had tank chassis with antiaircraft cannon mounted in place of big guns protecting them. If she spotted one of those, she’d sheer off. A hit or two from their shells would turn the U-2 to kindling. She deliberately thought about it in terms of the aircraft rather than herself.

Jinking, weaving, Ludmila came up on the Lizard guns. She didn’t see any of the antiaircraft tanks, so she bored in. “Za rodina! — For the motherland!” she shouted as her thumb came down on the firing button.

Lizard gunners scattered before her, like cockroaches across a kitchen floor when someone comes in with a lamp, Unlike cockroaches, some of them snatched up personal weapons and shot back. Muzzle flashes might have looked pretty as fireflies, but they meant the Lizards were trying to kill her. More thrumming noises spoke of bullets making hits on the Kukuruznik, but the little biplane kept flying.

Ludmila glanced at her fuel gauge. She had a bit more than half a tank left. Time to head for home, she thought regretfully; she hadn’t had such a good day shooting up the Lizards in a long time. But she also knew about stretching her luck. If she tried to go on until she found one more perfect target, she was only too likely to make one instead.

“There will be more tomorrow,” she said, and then laughed at herself. She wouldn’t wait for tomorrow to go out again: as soon as she had more fuel, more bullets, more bombs, she’d be in the air again. They kept using you until they used you up. Then they found somebody else-if they could.

What happens when they run out of everybody? she wondered. The answer came back stark: then we lose. It hadn’t happened yet, no matter how black things sometimes looked. But when the Germans drove on Moscow in 1941, they’d faced Russian winter and fresh troops from Siberia. Now it was the beginning of summer, and if the Red Army had any fresh troops left, Ludmila didn’t know where they might come from.

“Which means the veterans like me will just have to carry the load a while longer,” she said, adding after a moment, “if any veterans like me are left alive.” There was Georg Schultz, but he didn’t really count; he’d started the war on the wrong side. Colonel Karpov had been through the whole thing, but he was more a military administrator than a fighting soldier. Ludmila had nothing against that; Karpov ran his air base as well as a man could in the chaos of a losing war. But it removed him from her list, or what would have been her list had she had anyone to put on it.