Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

“I’ll go get my tools,” Lucille said, and strode off to do just that.

Captain Maczek watched her no-nonsense walk for a few seconds before he turned back to Daniels. “You know, Sergeant, if you’d come along to me with some little chippy you’d found, I’d have been very angry at you. But this one-I think she may do. If I’ve ever seen a female who can take care of herself, she’s it.”

“Reckon you’re right, sir.” Mutt pointed to the bones Maczek was still holding. “And we already know she can handle a shotgun.”

“That’s true, by God.” Maczek laughed. “Besides, she’s old enough to be a mother for most of the men. You have anybody in your squad with an Oedipus complex, you think?”

“ With a what, sir?” Mutt frowned-just because Maczek had been to college, he didn’t need to show off. And besides-“She’s not bad-lookin’, I don’t think.”

Captain Maczek opened his mouth to say something. By the glint in his eye, it would have been lewd or rude or both. But he didn’t say it-he was too smart an officer to make fun of his noncoms, especially in front of a bunch of listening soldiers. What he did finally say was, “However you like, Mutt. But remember, she’s going to be medic for the whole company, maybe the battalion, not just your squad.”

“Yeah, sure, Captain, I know that,” Daniels said. To himself, he added, I saw her first, though.

The U-2 droned through the night just above the treetops. The cold slipstream buffeted Ludmila Gorbunova’s face. It was not the only reason her teeth chattered. She was deep inside Lizardheld territory, If anything went wrong, she wouldn’t make it back to her dirt airstrip and the cramped little space she shared with the other female pilots.

She forced such thoughts from her mind, concentrated on the mission at hand. That was the only way to get through them, she’d learned: keep your mind firmly fixed on what you had to do now, then what you had to do next, and so on. Look ahead or off to one side and you were in trouble. That had been true against the Nazis; it was doubly so against the Lizards.

“What I have to do now,” she said, aloud, letting the slip-stream fling her words away behind her, “is find the partisan battalion.”

Easier said than done, in what looked like endless stretches of forest and plain. She thought her navigation was good, but when you were flying by compass and wristwatch, little errors always crept in. She thought about gaining altitude so she could see farther, but rejected the idea. It would also have made it easier for the Lizards to spot her.

She worked the pedals and the stick, swung the U-2 into a wide, slow spiral to search the terrain below. The little wood-and-fabric biplane responded beautifully to the controls, probably better than it had when it was new. Georg Schultz, her German mechanic, might be-was-a Nazi, but he was also a genius at keeping the aircraft not only flying but flying well in spite of an almost complete lack of spare parts.

There down below-was that a light? It was, and a moment later she spotted the other two with it. She’d been told to look for an equilateral triangle of lights. Here they were. She buzzed slowly overhead, hoping the partisans had all their instructions straight.

They did. As goon as they heard the sewing-machine whine of the U-2’s little Shvetsov engine, they set out two more lights, little ones, that were supposed to mark out the beginning of a stretch of ground where she could land safely. Her mouth went dry, as it did every time she had to land at night on a strip or a field she’d never seen before. The Kukuruznik was a rugged machine, but a mistake could still kill her.

She lined up on the landing lights, lost altitude, killed her airspeed-not that the U-2 had much to lose. At the last moment, the lights disappeared: they must have had collars, to keep them from being seen at ground level. Losing them made her heart thump fearfully, but then she was down.

The biplane bounced along over the field. Ludmila hit the brakes hard; every meter she traveled was one more meter in which a wheel might go into a hole and flip the U-2 over. Fortunately, it did not need many meters in which to stop.

Men-dark shapes in darker night-came running up and got to the Kukuruznik while the prop was still spinning. “You have presents for us, Comrade?” one of them called.

“I have presents,” Ludmila agreed. She heard the mutters when they heard her voice-variations on the theme of a woman! She was used to that; she’d been dealing with it ever since she joined the Red Air Force. But there were fewer such murmurs among the partisans than there had been at some air force bases to which she’d flown. A fair number of partisans were women, and most male partisans understood that women could fight.

She climbed down from the front cockpit, set a foot in the metal stirrup on the left side of the fuselage that gave access to the rear one. She didn’t go up into it, but started handing out boxes. “Here we are, Comrades: presents,” she said. “Rifles-with ammunition… submachine guns-with ammunition.”

“The weapons are good, but we already have most of the weapons we need,” a man said. “But next time you come, Comrade Pilot, bring us lots more bullets. It’s the ammunition we’re short of-we use a lot of it.” Wolflike chuckles rose from the partisans’ throats.

From back in the crowd of fighters, someone called, “Comrade, did you fetch us any 7.92mm ammunition? We have a lot of German rifles and machine guns we could use more if we had bullets for them.”

Ludmila hauled out a canvas bag that clinked metallically. The partisans’ murmurs turned appreciative; a couple of them clapped gloved hands together in delight. Ludmila said, “I am told to tell you: you cannot expect this bounty on every resupply run. We have to scavenge German cartridges-we don’t manufacture them. The way things are, we have a hard enough time manufacturing our own calibers.”

“Too bad,” said the man who had asked about German ammunition. “The Mauser is not a great rifle-accurate, da, but a slow, clumsy bolt-but the Nazis make a very fine machine gun.”

“Maybe we can work a trade,” the fellow who’d first greeted Ludmila said. “There’s a mostly German band of fighters back around Konotop, and they use our weapons just as we use theirs. They might swap some of their caliber for some of ours.”

Those couple of sentences spoke volumes about the anguish of the Soviet Union. Konotop, a hundred fifty kilometers east of Ludmila’s native Kiev, had been in German hands. Now it belonged to the Lizards. When would the Soviet workers and people be able to reclaim the rodina, the motherland?

Ludmila started handing out cardboard tubes and pots of paste. “Here you are, Comrades. Because wars are not won only by bullets, I bring also the latest posters by Efrimov and the Kukryniksi group.”

That drew pleased exclamations from the partisans. Newspapers hereabouts had been forced to echo the Nazi line; now they slavishly reproduced Lizard propaganda. Radios, especially those able to pick up signals from land still under human control, were few and far between. Posters gave one way of striking back. They could go up on a wall in seconds and show hundreds the truth for days.

“What do the men of Kukryniksi do this time?” a woman asked.

“It’s one of their better ones, I think,” Ludmila said, which was no small praise, for the team of Kupryanov, Krylov, and Sokolov probably turned out the best Soviet poster art. She went on, “This one shows a Lizard in Pharaoh’s headdress lashing Soviet peasants; the caption reads, ‘A Return to Slavery.’ ”