Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

“I’ll take the jets,” he told the other males. “You two handle the ones with the revolving airfoils. Knock down a few and keep going; we haven’t any time to waste toying with them.”

He chose targets for his missiles, gave them to the computer.

When the tone from the speaker taped to his hearing diaphragm told him the computer had acquired them, he touched the firing button. The killercraft bucked slightly as the wingtip missiles leapt away.

One of the jets never knew what hit it. He watched electronically as a missile swatted it out of the air. The other Tosevite pilot must have spotted the missile meant for him. He tried to dive away from it, but his aircraft wasn’t fast enough for that. He went down, too.

Gefron’s wingmales salvoed all their missiles, wingtip and pylon both, at the Deutsch aircraft That blasted a gaping hole in their formation, through which the killercraft flew. Rolvar and Xarol shouted excitedly; they hadn’t seen so much opposition since the war was new.

Gefron was pleased, too, but also a little worried. The Big Ugly pilots weren’t fleeing; they were trying to regroup in the wake of the killercraft. Returning to base, only he would have missiles left to fire at them.

It shouldn’t matter, Gefron told himself. If we can’t get by them with our speed, altitude, radar and cannon, we don’t deserve to conquer this planet. But it was one more thing to worry about.

He studied the radar display. “Approaching target,” he said. “Remember, the Deutsche have set up a dummy target north of the real installation. If you bomb that one, by mistake, I promise that you’ll never get your, tailstumps into a killercraft again as long as you live.”

The real Ploesti lay in a little vale. Gefron had it on his radar set. He peered through the windscreen, ready to paint the assigned refineries with his laser to guide the bombs in. But instead of the towers of the refineries and petroleum wells, the big squat cylinders that stored refined hydrocarbons, all he saw was a spreading, thickening cloud of gray-black smoke. He hissed. The Deutsche weren’t playing fair.

His wingmales noticed the problem at the same time he did. “What are we stupposed to do now?” Rolyar asked. “How can we light up the targets through all that junk?”

Gefron wanted to abort the mission and fly back to base. But, because he was the flight leader, anything that went wrong would get blamed on him. “We’ll bomb anyway,” he declared. “Whatever in the smoke we hit will hurt the Deutsche somehow.”

“Truth,” Xarol declared. The flight went on. Gefron turned on the laser targeting system in the hope it would penetrate the smoke or find some clear patches through which to acquire accurate targets for the bombs his killercraft carried under its wings. No luck-instead of the steady tone he wanted to hear, all he got was the complaintng warble of a system that couldn’t lock on.

The Deutsch antiaircraft guns that lined the ridges on either side of the petroleum wells and refineries opened up with everything they had. More smoke dotted the sky, now in big black puffs around and mostly behind the flight of killercraft: the Big Uglies at the guns weren’t leading the Race’s aircraft quite enough.

Even so, the display of firepower was impressive. The bursts from exploding Tosevite shells seemed close enough together for Gefron to get out of his aircraft and walk across them. Once or twice he heard sharp rattles, like gravel bouncing off sheet metal. It wasn’t gravel, though; it was fragments of shell casing punching holes in his fuselage and wing. He anxiously scanned the instrument panel for damage lights. None came on.

The Deutsche were defending Ploesti every way they knew how. Above the clotted smoke floated balloons tethered to stout cables that might wreck an aircraft that ran into them. More antiaircraft guns, some cannons like those on the high ground to either side, others mere machine guns that spat glowing tracers, fired out of the smoke. They had no radar control and so could not see what they hoped to hit, but they added more metal to an already crowded sky.

“Does anyone have laser lock-on?” Gefron asked hopefully. Both wingmales denied it. Gefron sighed. The results would not be what his superiors had hoped for. “Proceed on purely visual bombing run.”

“It shall be done, Flight Leader,” Xarol and Rolvar chorused.

Then they were over the billowing smoke. Gefron poised a claw at the bomb-release button. The killercraft lost both weight and drag as the ordnance fell away. All at once it seemed a much better performer.

“We did hurt them, by the spirits of departed Emperors!” Xarol said exultantly.

The wingmale was right. Sudden new angry clouds of black, greasy smoke roiled up through the screen the Deutsche had stretched above Ploesti. Through new smoke and old, Gefron saw sullen orange fireballs blooming like so many huge, terrible flowers.

“The Big Uglies will be a long time repairing that,” the flight leader agreed happily. He radioed a report of success to the base from which he’d set out, then returned to the intraflight frequency: “Now we go home.”

“As if we had any real home on this cold ball of mud,” Rolvar said.

“Part of it-the more southerly latitudes-can be quite pleasant,” Gefron replied. “And even this area’s not too bad in local summer. Present conditions, of course, are something else again-I assure you, I find frozen water as revolting as does any other male in his right mind.”

He brought his killercraft onto the reciprocal of the course he’d flown to Ploesti. As he did so, his radar picked up the Big Ugly aircraft through which his flight had barreled on the way to the refinery complex. They hadn’t come straight after the killercraft; instead, they’d loitered along the likely return route and used the time while he and his wingmales were making their bombing run to gain altitude.

Gefron would have been just as glad to scoot past unnoticed, but one of the Big Uglies spotted him and his comrades. They might have been radarless, but they had radios. What one of them saw, the others learned in moments. Their aircraft turned toward the flight for an attack run.

The range closed frighteningly fast. The Big Uglies flew inadequate aircraft, but they flew them with panache and courage, darting straight at Gefron and his wingmales. The flight leader fired his next-to-last missile and then, a moment later, his last one. Two Tosevite planes tumbled in ruins. The rest kept coming.

On the head-up display, Gefron saw another enemy aircraft break up, and yet another: Rolvar and Xarol were using their cannon to good effect. But the Big Uglies were firing, too; through the windscreen, past the head-up display, the flight leader watched the pale flashes from their guns. He turned the nose of his killercraft toward the nearest Big Ugly, fired a short burst. Smoke poured from the enemy’s engine; the plane began to fall.

Then the flight was through the horde of Tosevites. Gefron let out a long sigh of relief: the Big Uglies could not hope to pursue. He keyed his radio: “All well, wingmales?”

“All well, Flight Leader,” Rolvar answered. But Xarol said, “Not all well, superior sir. I took several hits as we mixed it up with the Big Uglies. I’ve lost electrical power to some of my control surfaces, and I’m losing hydraulic pressure in the backup system. I am not certain I will be able to complete return to base.”

“I will inspect visually.” Gefron gained altitude and lost speed, letting Xarol pull ahead of him: What he saw made him hiss in dismay: part of the tail surface of his wingmale’s killercraft had been shot away, and two lines of dismayingly large holes stitched the right wing and fuselage. “You didn’t just take several hits; you got yourself chewed up. Can you keep it flying?”