Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

“They want me to fail,” he said. The horse snorted again. He patted its neck. “They really do.”

When he and foul-mouthed Max made contact with a Red Army unit still in the direct chain of command from Moscow, the Soviets had been effusive in their praise and scrupulously exact in sharing out the precious booty Germans and Russians had combined to seize. Only afterward did things get difficult.

No, he’d been told, unfortunately air transportation wasn’t available. Yes, the Red Army colonel understood his urgent need to return to Germany. But did he understand how likely he was to be shot down before he got there? No, the colonel could not in good conscience let him risk his life by flying.

Now Jager snorted, louder than the horse had. “When a Russian colonel says he won’t risk a life, you know something’s screwy somewhere.” Against the Germans in the last war and this one, the Russian way of putting out a fire was to throw bodies on it till it smothered.

With knees, reins, and voice, Jager urged the horse forward. He hadn’t done much riding since before World War I broke out, but he still remembered the basics. It was a very different business from traveling by panzer. Inside that heavy steel turret, you felt cut off from the world and immune to whatever it might do to you… unless it decided to hit you with a shell, of course.

But on horseback, you met the world face to face. At the moment, the world was snowing in Jager’s face. The Russians had given him a fur hat, a padded jacket, and felt boots, so he wasn’t chilly. Now that he was inside some of it, he discovered for himself how good Russian cold-weather gear really was. No wonder the Ivans had given the Wehrmacht such grief the winter before.

He leaned down, spoke confidentially into the horse’s ear. “If anyone ever asks the Kremlin about this, they’ll be able to say they gave me all the help they thought they could, but I just didn’t make it back to Germany with this stuff.” He slapped a saddlebag again. “But do you know what, Russian horse? I’m going to fool them. I’m going to get there whether they want me to or not. And if they don’t like it, they can go piss themselves for all I care.”

The horse, of course, had no idea what he was talking about. Not only was it a dumb animal, it was a Russian dumb animal. Till recently, it had been either pulling a plow for the enemy or carrying a Red Army cavalryman into action. But for the time being, its fate and his were bound together.

The snow muffled the animal’s hoolbeats. Its body heat warmed the insides of his thighs and his rear end. His Panzer III, he remembered fondly, had had a heater that would warm all of him. On the other hand, he liked the horse’s grassy smell better than the oil, petrol, cordite reek of the panzer.

“Yes, that’s how the Kremlin wants it, horse,” he said. “They needed German help to get this metal, but do they want the Reich to have the benefit of it? Not on your life they don’t. They want to be the only ones who can make bombs like this, yes they do. They will use one on the Lizards, and if they beat the Lizards, wouldn’t it be nice for them if they could hold one over Germany’s head, too? But I already told you, horse, I don’t intend to let that happen.”

He peered ahead through the spattering snow. Unfortunately, what he intended to let happen and what would in fact happen were not necessarily one and the same. He didn’t think he was inside what had been Soviet territory before the war any more, but rather in what was formerly Polish-held Ruthernia. Much of that land, after getting overrun first by the Russians and then by the Germans, was now in the Lizards’ hands.

And here, as perhaps nowhere else on earth, the Lizards had their willing puppets-their quislings, the British would have called them, Jager thought with wry amusement. In Moscow, he’d listened to Moishe Russie on the shortwave a couple of times. He’d judged the man a hysteric, a liar, and a traitor to mankind.

Now… now he was not so sure. Every time he tried to laugh off what the Jew said as just another atrocity story, he kept remembering the scar on the side of Max’s neck and the Jewish partisan’s obscenely embellished tale of slaughter and horror at Babi Yar. Much as he wanted to, he didn’t think Max lied. And if Max’s horror was true, then Moishe Russie’s might be, also.

Riding a horse alone through winter gave-you a chance to think, maybe more of a chance than you really wanted. What had the Reich been doing behind the lines of the territory it held? Jager was a field-grade officer, not a policymaker. But German officers were supposed to think for themselves, not blindly follow superiors’ orders like their Soviet or Lizard counterparts. He could not for the life of him see how massacring Jews moved the war effort forward even a centimeter.

Massacring Jews might in fact push the war effort back It had driven the Polish Jews who survived into the Lizards’ arms. A lot of those Jews lay between Jager and the Reich. If they spotted him and let their new masters know a German was loose on their territory… if they did that, the Russians’ scheme would be realized in full.

“Stupid,” he muttered. What did Jews do in battle against the Reich except get in the way like any other civilians?

He rode by a deserted farmhouse, shook his head. So much devastation. How long would people take to recover from it? Even more to the point, on what terms would they recover? Would they be their own masters, or slaves to the Lizards for untold centuries to come? Jager found no sure answer. Humanity had discovered ways to hurt the Lizards, but not to beat them, not yet. Maybe-he hoped-he held a way to beat them in his saddlebags.

The road he was following (actually, it was more of a track) took him into a stand of pale-barked birches a few hundred meters past the farmhouse. He unslung his rifle, set it across his knees. Unpleasant things and even more unpleasant people could lurk among trees. He showed his teeth in a not-quite-humorless grin. A few weeks before, he’d been one of those unpleasant people, or so the Lizards. would have said.

A man stepped out from behind a tree trunk. Like Jager, he wore a mixture of Russian and German winter gear; also like Jager, he carried a rifle. He didn’t aim it at the German, but he looked ready to use it. He said something in Polish. Jager didn’t know any Polish. He weighed his chances as he reined in. If he could get in a quick, sure shot-no guarantee while on horseback-then set spurs to his mount, he had a chance at getting away from this… bandit?

The fellow might have been thinking along with him. “I wouldn’t try that,” he said, now in accented German-or was it Yiddish? “Look behind you.” Jager didn’t look. The man standing in the track laughed, leaned his rifle against the nearest tree. “No trick. Go ahead and look.”

This time, Jager did. He could see two men, both with guns. He wondered how many he couldn’t see. He turned back to the fellow in front of him. “All right, you have me,” he said equably. “What happens now?”

He didn’t know which nonplussed the fellow more, his calm or his clear German. The man grabbed his rifle, a Mauser just like Jager’s. “I thought you were one of those Nazi bastards,” he growled. “You don’t ride like a Pole or a Russian. I ought to shoot you now.” He was speaking Yiddish. Jager’s heart sank.

“Hold on, Yossel,” called one of the men in back of the German. “We’re supposed to take him in to-”

“If you’re going to take me to the Lizards, do me the favor of shooting me instead,” Jager broke in. Here was his worst nightmare coming to life around him. If the Lizards made him talk-and who knew what the Lizards could do along those lines? — he might imperil the Russians’ efforts with the stolen metal, and Germany’s would never be born.