Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

More fire, some blue, some orange, spurted from the stricken vehicle. Hatches popped open in the turret; three Lizards bailed out. Now, yelling like a savage, Jens fired with ferocious glee. Suddenly the tables were turned, the tormentors all but helpless against those they had bedeviled. One Lizard fell, then another.

Then the tank brewed up as the fire reached the main fuel storage. Flame washed over the whole chassis; a smoke ring spurted up from the turret. Pops and booms marked ammunition starting to cook off. The last Lizard who’d made it out of the hatch went down under a fusillade of bullets.

The kid major was up on his feet, waving like a madman. Off to the east, the distant roar of engines marked new motion from the tanks and self-propelled guns the Lizard tank had stalled. Then the major ran back to see how the two BAR men were. Jens ran with him.

One of them was gruesomely dead, the top of his skull clipped off by a Lizard round and gray-red brains splashed in the snow. The other had a belly wound. He was unconscious but breathing. The major pulled aside clothes, dusted the bleeding wound with sulfa powder, slapped on a field dressing, and waved for a medic.

He turned to Larssen: “You know what? I think we’re really gonna do this!”

“Maybe.” Jens knew his voice wasn’t everything it should be; he hadn’t hardened himself against human beings looking like selections from the butcher’s. Trying not to think of that, he asked, “What did they use to take out the tank?” As if to punctuate his words, more rounds went up inside the blazing hulk.

“The rocket? Wasn’t that great?” When the major grinned, he didn’t look a day over seventeen. “The fancy name is 2.36-inch Rocket Launcher, but all the teams I know are calling it after that crazy instrument Bob Burns plays on the radio.”

“A bazooka?” Larssen grinned, too. “I like that.”

“So do I.” The major’s grin slipped a little. “I just wish we had a hell of a lot more of ’em. They were brand new last year, and of course we’ve had the devil’s own time building ’em since the damned Lizards came. But what we’ve got, we’re using.” All at once, he went from informant back to officer. “Now we’ve got to get moving. Bust your hump, there!”

“Shouldn’t they go ahead, sir?” Jens pointed to the Lees and Shermans just now rattling past the carcass of the Lizard tank.

“They need us, too,” the major answered. “They make the hole, we go through it and we support them. If the Lizards had had some infantry on the ground to support that vehicle, we couldn’t have stalked it the way we did. Their machines are marvelous and you can’t say they’re not brave, but their tactical doctrine stinks.”

Colonel Groves, Larssen remembered, had said the same thing. At the. time, it hadn’t seemed to matter; the aliens’ machines were carrying everything before them. But it seemed they might be fought successfully after all.

The major was already moving west again. Jens trotted heavily after him, giving the pyre of the Lizard tank a wide berth.

Assault Force Commander Relhost said, “No, I can’t send you more landcruisers up there in your sector.”

On the radio, the voice of Zingiber, the Northern Flank Commander, was anguished. “But I need them! The Big Uglies have so much of their garbage coming at me that they’re pushing me back. And it’s not alI garbage any more, either: I lost three landcruisers today to those stinking rockets they’ve started using. Our crews aren’t trained to regard infantry as a tactical threat, and we can’t pull them out for training sessions now.”

“Hardly.” Relhost didn’t want to know whether Zingiber was serious or not. He might have been; some males still hadn’t adjusted to the pace war required on Tosev 3. Relhost went on, “I say again, I have no more landcruisers to send. We’ve lost seven on the southern flank as well, and the rocket threat is making us deploy them more cautiously there, too.”

“But I need them,” Zingiber repeated, as if his need would conjure landcruisers out of thin air. “I say again, superior sir, that as things stand we are losing ground. The two Big Ugly attacks may even succeed in joining.”

“Yes, I know. I am also looking at a map screen.” Relhost didn’t like what he saw there, either if the Big Uglies did manage to link their thrusts, they’d cut support for his principal assault force, which was finally pounding into the suburbs of Chicago. That was expensive, too; in the rubble of their towns, the Tosevites fought like ssvapi on Rabotev 2 protecting their burrows.

Zingiber said, “If you can’t send landcruisers, send helicopters to help me take out some more of the Tosevites’ armor.”

Relhost made up his mind that if Zingiber made one more such idiotic request, he’d relieve him. He hissed angrily before he pressed the TRANSMIT button. “We have fewer helicopters than landcruisers to spare. The miserable Tosevites have learned something new.” They’re faster at that than we are. The thought worried him. He made himself continue: “They’ve brought their antiaircraft artillery as far forward as they can, towing it with light armor or sometimes even with soft-skinned vehicles. The helicopters are armored against rifle-caliber bullets. To armor them against these shells would make them too heavy to fly.”

“Let them ship us landcruisers from elsewhere on this stinking planet, then,” Zingiber said.

“The logistics!” Relhost cringed. “Landcruisers are so big and heavy only two will fit onto even our biggest hauler aircraft. And we brought few of those aircraft to Tosev 3, not anticipating so large a need. Besides, the haulers are unarmed and vulnerable to the upsurge in Tosevite air activity lately. It takes only one of those nasty little machines slipping through a killercraft screen to bring down the hauler and the landcruiser both.”

“But if we don’t get reinforcements from somewhere, we’ll lose this battle,” Zingiber said. “Let them put the landcruisers on a starship if they must, so long as we get them.”

“Land a starship in the middle of a combat zone, vulnerable to artillery and the Emperor only knows what ingenious sabotage the Big Uglies can devise? You must be joking.” Relhost made a bitter decision. “I’ll pull a few landcruisers back from the principal assault force… maybe more than a few. They can return once they rectify the situation.”

I hope, he thought. The landcruisers didn’t run without fuel, and the Tosevites were doing everything they could to interfere with supply lines. No one loved logistics, but armies that ignored logistics died.

Of course, the Tosevites had fuel problems of their own. They’d stockpiled the noxious stuff their machines burned for this campaign, but the facilities that produced it were vulnerable to assault. Relhost looked at the map again. He hoped the Race would assault them soon.

A couple of Big Uglies in long black coats and wide-brimmed black hats pushed an ordnance cart toward the flight of killercraft. Gefron took no notice of them; Tosevites were doing a lot of menial work these days, to let males of the Race get on with the business of conquering Tosev 3.

Gefron gave Rolvar and Xarol, his fellow pilots in the flight, their last few instructions: “Remember, this one is important. We really have to plaster that Ploesti place; the Big Uglies of Deutschland draw much of their fuel from it.”

“It shall be done,” the other two males chorused together.

Gefron went on, “So much I have been ordered to tell you. But for myself, I would like to dedicate this mission to the spirit of my predecessor as head of this unit, Flight Leader Teerts. We shall aid in making it impossible for the Big Uglies to kill or capture-we still do not know his exact fate-any more brave males like Teerts. Thanks to us, the conquest of Tosev 3 shall grow nearer its completion.”