Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

When she and Molotov went dip-clopping out to the airstrip next morning, she discovered the German ground crew had daubed the U-2’s wings and fuselage with splotches of whitewash. One of the fellows in overalls said, “Now you’ll look more like snow and rocks.”

Soviet winter camouflage was more thoroughly white, but snow drifted more evenly across the steppe than it did in mountains. She didn’t know how much the whitewash would help, but supposed it couldn’t hurt. The groundcrew man grinned as she thanked him in her accented German.

When she got a good look at the mountains toward which she was flying, she was glad she’d taken the Luftwaffe officer’s advice and not tried to make the trip by night. The landing field to which she was ordered lay not far outside the village of Berchtesgaden. When she set the Kukuruznik down there, she assumed Hitler’s residence lay within the village.

Instead, a long wagon ride up the side of the mountain-Obersalzberg, she learned it was called-followed. Molotov sat staring stonily straight ahead the whole way up. He said nothing much. Whatever went on behind the mask of his face, he kept it there. He glared right through the soldiers at two checkpoints, ignored the barbed wire that ringed the compound.

Hitler’s Berghof, when the wagon finally reached it, reminded Ludmila of a pleasant little resort house (the view was magnificent) swallowed up by a residence that met the demands of a world leader. Molotov was whisked away into the Berghof ; Ludmila thought she recognized his German counterpart, von Ribbentrop, from newsreels during the strange couple of years when the Soviet Union and Germany held to their friendship treaty.

She wasn’t important enough to be lodged in the Berghof. The Germans escorted her over to a guesthouse not far away. As she stood in the splendid lobby, all she could think was how many workers and peasants had had their labor exploited to create it. She was primly certain no one in the classless Soviet Union cared to live in such unnecessary splendor.

Down the staircase came an officer in the natty black uniform and beret of the German panzer formations: a colonel, by the two pips on each braided shoulder strap. On his right breast he wore a large, garish eight-pointed gold star with a swastika in the center. He was lean and perfectly shaved and looked quite at home here close by his Fuhrer; just watching his smooth stride made Ludmila feel short, and dumpy and out of place. She swung the knapsack that held her few belongings over one shoulder.

The motion drew the natty colonel’s eye. He stopped, stared, then hurried across the parquet floor to her. “Ludmila!” he exclaimed, and went on in fair Russian: “What the devil are you doing here?”

She recognized his voice even if she hadn’t known his face. “Heinrich!” she said, trying hard not to pronounce it with an initial g as Russians often did. She was so glad to find someone she knew that, heedless equally of startled looks from her German escorts and, of what Molotov would think when the news got back to han, she gave Jager a hug he enthusiastically returned. “You’ve been promoted two grades,” she observed. “That’s wonderful.”

His grin was self-deprecating. “They offered me a choice: lieutenant colonel and the Knight’s Cross or colonel and just Hitler’s fried egg here.” He patted the gaudy medal. “Excuse me, the German Cross in gold. They thought I’d take glory. I took rank. Rank lasts.

“Hitler’s fried egg?” Ludmila echoed in delicious amazement. She noticed her escorts were ostentatiously pretending they hadn’t noticed that. She shook her head. “My, we’ll have a lot to talk about.”

“Yes we will.” For a moment Jager’s face assumed the watchful expression she’d first seen at the Ukraiman kolkhoz. Then the smile came back. “Yes, we will,” he repeated. “Quite a lot.”

Atvar stared out at the assembled shiplords. They silently stared back. He tried to gauge their mood before he called the meeting to order. Nothing short of mutiny-maybe not even that-would have surprised him. Well past one of the Race’s years into a campaign expected to be a walkover, no one had yet turned one eye turret, let alone two, toward victory.

The fleetlord decided to confront that head-on: “Assembled males, I know we face new problems almost every day on Tosev 3. Sometimes we are even forced to face old problems over again, as in the Tosevite empire called Italia.”

The shiplord Straha stood, crouched, and waited to be recognized. When Atvar pointed to him, he asked, “How did the Deutsche manage to kidnap what’s-his-name-the Big Ugly in charge of Italia-”

“Mussolini,” Atvar supplied.

“Thank you, Exalted Fleetlord. Yes, Mussolini. How did the Deutsche manage to steal him when we shut him up in that castle away from everything after he had surrendered his empire to us?”

“How they learned where he was, we do not know,” Atvar admitted. “They are skilled at such irregular warfare, and I must concede the move has embarrassed us.”

“Embarrassed us? I should say so.” Straha added an emphatic cough. “His radio broadcasts from Deutschland negate much of the value we got from that Big Ugly from Warsaw, the one who spoke so convincingly against the Deutsche.”

“Russie,” Atvar said after a quick glance at a tickler file on the computer screen in front of him. The file also told him something else: “We’d reached the point of diminishing returns with that one in any case. His last statement had to be electronically altered to make it conform to our requirements.”

“The Big Uglies have not yet adjusted themselves to the idea that the Race will rule over them,” the shiplord Kirel said mournfully.

“And why should they?” Straha retorted, his voice dripping sarcasm. “As far as I can see, they have no reason to. This affair with Mussolini is but one more embarrassment in a long series. Now Italia seethes with sabotage, where before it was among the calmest of the empires under our control”

Feneress, a male of Straha’s faction, chimed in, “Moreover, it lets the Deutsche make a folk hero of this”-he checked his own computer for the name he sought-“this Skorzeny who led the raid, and encourages other Tosevites to try to emulate his feat.”

Kirel started to come to Atvar’s defense, but the fleetlord held up a hand. “What you say is true, Feneress,” he replied. “For his failure, the male in charge of the Big Ugly Mussolini’s security would normally have found himself liable to severe disciplinary action. As, however, he perished in the Tosevite raid, this has become impracticable.”

The assembled shiplords stirred and murmured among themselves. For the fleetlord to admit failure so frankly was strange and untoward. No wonder they murmured they had to be trymg to figure out what Atvar’s concession meant Did it signal a change in strategy? Did it mean Atvar would resign his post perhaps in favor of Straha? If so, what did that imply for each shiplord?

Atvar raised his hand again. Slowly, the murmurs died away. The fleetlord said, “I did not summon you to the bannership to dwell on failure, assembled shiplords. On the contrary. I summoned you here to outline a course which, I believe, will give us victory.”

The officers stirred and murmured all over again. Some of them, Atvar knew, had begun to despair of victory. Others still thought it could be attained, but the means they wanted to use would leave Tosev 3 a ruin unfit for settlement by the colonization fleet now traveling across interstellar space toward the planet. If he could prove them wrong and still make the Big Uglies submit, Atvar would be ahead indeed. And he thought he could.